DISCRIMINATION WITHIN THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM

Discrimination within the Judicial System

Discrimination within the Judicial System

Abstract

This paper examines race-based peremptory challenges. Such challenges occur during the voir dire jury selection process. The process allows both the defense and the prosecution to strike jurors who they believe will not decide cases fairly. However, in the case of Batson v. Kentucky 476 U.S. 79 (1986), the Supreme Court ruled that race could not be used as a factor in eliminating prospective jurors. This paper examines federal litigation for five years in which it was alleged that race was used as a factor in removing a juror. An examination of the cases revealed that most of the cases involved sole male litigants who allege that there were multiple race-based peremptory challenges used in their cases. Moreover, most of the cases that led to the allegations involved violent offenses. Other case characteristics are noted, but of most significance was the finding that most appellants lost their cases. As such, the courts felt that most of the challenges were, in fact, race neutral. The implications of this research are discussed.

Discrimination within the Judicial System

Introduction

As one of the hallmarks of the early American criminal justice system, the right to a jury trial actual served as an example of the difference between colonial America and the countries from whence so many people left and such practices did not exist (Chapin 1983). Since these early times, the fairness and effectiveness of the system has been called into question (Rottman 2000). Therefore, irrespective of the fact that the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a trial by an impartial jury, some believe certain court processes work against achieving such a lofty goal (Cole 1999). In general, though, the standard of “trial by an impartial jury” has been translated into the belief that jurors should be somewhat reflective of the community in which a defendant resides. Even with this consideration, over the past few centuries, particularly in southern courts, those African Americans who made it to court before being lynched were tried before hostile all-White juries. Well-known trials involving the Scottsboro boys, and the killers of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, and numerous others, showed how White juries often engaged in jury nullification and ignored the facts; thus, deciding cases on racist conventions that produced countless injustices in southern courts (Higginbotham 1996).

As a product of these incidents, in 1965, the Supreme Court heard the case of Swain v. Alabama, which involved a Black man indicted for raping a White girl. During the trial, the prosecutor used his peremptory challenges to remove all six Black jurors. Swain eventually appealed his conviction “arguing that he was denied equal protection by the state's exercise of peremptory challenges to exclude Blacks from the petit jury” (Browne-Marshall 2007, p. 198). On appeal, both the Alabama and the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the prosecution. According to Browne-Marshall (2007), the Supreme Court noted that in order for Swain to win his appeal, he had to prove that the removal of ...