I got my jury summons last week. I’m ready to be an improved and empowered juror. That’s because of the Black Jurors Matter workshop I attended this past summer. The workshop was part of the campaign launched by the Organization for Black Struggle earlier this year.
Attorney Will Snowden, founded of The Juror Project, came to St. Louis to conduct workshops on how to be an effective and responsible juror. The New Orleans-based organization is committed to getting better-informed and more-enthusiastic citizens into jury pools across the country.
There were two important issues participants learned in the workshops. One was understanding the distinctions between jury strikes. The other was understanding the power of jury nullification.
When interviewing jurors, there are two types of strikes allowed by the defense and the prosecution: peremptory strikes and strikes “for cause.”
Each side can strike a potential juror if they believe that person will be prejudicial towards their side. This doesn’t have to be explicit bias. In the case of a workplace injury where the company is being sued, the defense attorney may strike a potential juror who was hurt on the job.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Kentucky v. Batson makes it unconstitutional to strike a potential juror based upon race after black or brown defendants often ended up with all-white juries instead a jury of their peers. Batson was later expanded to include ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. Even so, this doesn’t mean one will always have an impartial jury of their peers.
Too many times in our need to get out of jury duty, we give one side (often the prosecution) a pass in not having to use a legitimate strike. For example, during the questioning of a juror in the above hypothetical case, the person could say something like “I was injured on my job but I think I can put that aside and listen to the all the evidence in this case and be fair.”
In urban areas where there may be an officer-involved shooting, there are plenty of citizens who’ve had negative encounters with the police and may be explicitly biased towards the officer on trial. Can you listen to all the facts in the case and be fair? Sure you can.
Snowden helped also us to better understand jury nullification, a rare but age-old right of juries that traveled to these shores with English colonizers. Nullification is the right of a jury to refuse to convict even when there may be evidence that a law has been broken. Jurors exercise their right to nullify a law that they believe is either immoral or wrongly applied.
Nullification can used for noble causes, as in some slave fugitive cases or for those convicted of marijuana use for a debilitating disease. They’ve also been used to uphold the racist status quo in cases like the killers of Emmitt Till. His killers confessed but the all-white jury saw nothing wrong with their lynching him.
The court almost never informs juries of their right to nullification. Some juries have felt locked in by unfair laws and special circumstances of the defendant but felt they had no alternative but to convict or acquit. The case of George Zimmerman is a good example of a frustrated jury boxed in by Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, a defense used by Zimmerman when he murdered unarmed Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman was acquitted.
There is much black folks still don’t know about the U.S. criminal justice system until we get catapulted into it as a defendant or juror. Then it’s sink or swim. And looking at the overwhelming numbers of African Americans in the system, we are sinking. A deeper understanding of our rights in this hostile system is a lifeline for justice and our survival.
