Study Finds Blacks Blocked From Southern Juries

[MrScorpio]

In late April in a courthouse in Madison County, Ala., a prosecutor was asked to explain why he had struck 11 of 14 black potential jurors in a capital murder case. The district attorney, Robert Broussard, said one had seemed “arrogant” and “pretty vocal.” In another woman, he said he “detected hostility.”

Mr. Broussard also questioned the “sophistication” of a former Army sergeant, a forklift operator with three years of college, a cafeteria manager, an assembly-line worker and a retired Department of Defense program analyst.

The analyst, he said, “did not appear to be sophisticated to us in her questionnaire, in that she spelled Wal-Mart, as one of her previous employers, as Wal-marts.”

Arguments like these were used for years to keep blacks off juries in the segregationist South, systematically denying justice to black defendants and victims. But today, the practice of excluding blacks and other minorities from Southern juries remains widespread and, according to defense lawyers and a new study by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit human rights and legal services organization in Montgomery, Ala., largely unchecked.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/us/02jury.html?pagewanted=all?src=tp&_r=1&

[uponit7771]

1. This one of the central problems with the judicial system in the US

[love_katz]

2. "Did not appear sophisticated..."

Because of an error similar to a typo? For a DoD program analyst?

Ye gods.

[bettyellen]

3. Thank you- I think a lot of us have not considered the breadth of the exclusion of

African Americans in so many areas of civic life, on top of the second class everything (starting with education) we expect them to just accept as their lot.

I'm thinking of the hard time NYC schools have had- even had after they WON a court case that would leave them funded as well as schools upstate. The judge overturned the decision to apportion more money and remarked something to the effect of "someone has to flip burgers". Fuck these people. Seriously. This is systematic disenfranchisement of a huge portion of our populace. Makes me want to scream!

[Scurrilous]

4. K & R

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

5. People here are yelling at me because I believe that there was jury nullification in the Zimmerman

case.

I grew up in the South. The racists are straight up nuts down there!

[noiretextatique]

7. i believe that too: jury nullification

i was hopeful that it would not happen, but i know it did.
i did not grow up in the south, but my parents did and my extended family still lives there. some people want us to forget history and just pretend it's all post-racial now, but we know it is not true...it is nothing more than a self-serving fantasy. declare racism dead, then act really, really racist. that's been pretty much the rw strategy since the 70's. that idiot juror B37 said it all.

[KittyWampus]

6. sigh.