Black lives in White hands? – Final Call News

More than 2,000 people are on death row in the United States, and at least a third are Black. Many were sentenced to death by majority White or all-White juries.
The Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) released a report in February on “Unreliable Verdicts: Racial Bias and Wrongful Convictions.” The report, written by the organization’s senior attorney and senior writer Jennifer Rae Taylor, highlights problems of racial bias in jury selection and the impact the racial makeup of a jury plays on sentencing.
According to the National Center for State Courts, jury decision-making is an integral part of the country’s criminal justice system, with about 50,000 jury trials each year.
“Modern defenses of criminal law, mass incarceration, and the death penalty regularly reference jury decision-making as inherently sound, dignified, and sacred,” the EJI report says. “The citizen jury has long been a bedrock of America’s constitutional system, lauded by founding fathers and Supreme Court justices alike.”
But the report challenges the meaning of “jury of one’s peers,” noting that “for much of this nation’s history, the methods used to select juries were strict, narrow, sexist, and racist,” and a “good jury” often consisted of White men.
The report describes jury service as a “right of citizenship” historically “shaped by racial discrimination.” It linked jury selection to the historic voter discrimination and disenfranchisement Black people have faced throughout their sojourn in America.
“Just as Black communities came to expect little representation from elected officials who had no need to court their votes, they expected—and found—little justice in courts where trial by [white] jury simply reinforced the racism and subjugation of life under Jim Crow,” the report says.
All-White juries would acquit White men involved in horrific crimes against Black people, such as lynchings, kidnapping and rape, while sentencing innocent Black people, particularly men and boys, to death. And as Black people started to integrate, juries still stayed White, with potential Black jurors finding themselves stricken from the jury pool.
The Supreme Court attempted to change this reality through the 1986 case, Batson v. Kentucky, when the court decided the use of peremptory challenges, the objection of a proposed juror, based on race violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. But despite the ruling, racial bias in jury selection persists.
Civil rights leader, attorney and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who ruled with the majority on the 1986 case, predicted that prosecutors “would now learn to reach the same results—excluding Black jurors and trying cases before all-White juries—by hiding their strikes behind acceptable race-neutral reasons,” according to the report.
“The decision today will not end the racial discrimination that the peremptories inject into the jury-selection process,” Justice Marshall wrote in his opinion. “That goal can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely.”
And as predicted, prosecutors learned how to still legally exclude Black people from juries. The results look like the present makeup of prison inmates, as studies have shown that “all-white juries convicted Black defendants at a significantly higher rate than White defendants,” according to the report.
In cases when the death penalty is raised, all-White juries are also more likely to sentence a Black defendant to death.
The report highlights the case of Marcellus Williams, a 55-year-old Black man who was executed by the state of Missouri on Sept. 24, 2024. He was “tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by a 12-member jury that included just one Black person” in a county 20 percent Black at the time.
And for more than 20 years, he maintained his innocence. Countless others have been exonerated after serving 10, 20 or 30 years on death row due to being sentenced by an all-White or majority-White jury. Such was the case of Curtis Flowers, a Black man who was arrested in 1996 and exonerated in 2020 after saying for 24 years that he did not rob and kill four people in Winona, Mississippi.
“The death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit,” the report quotes EJI director Bryan Stevenson. “The real question of capital punishment in this country is, do we deserve to kill?”—Anisah Muhammad, Staff Writer
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