

Exclusion of Blacks from Juries Raises Renewed Scrutiny - Kinnard
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/us/politics/exclusion-of-blacks-from-juries-raises-renewed-scrutiny.html

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tired_man
This could easily be solved by making a random selection of jurors and
alternates from the available pool. have everyone reporting for selection draw
a numbered ticket from a hat.

No names, no faces, no questions about what you do for a living, nope, none of
that. You get who you asked for, and without the bullshit at the beginning
where the lawyer and da (and their jury consultants) work to stack the jury in
their favour.

You want peers? Well, any random 12 out of the "random" pool selection ought
to about cover it.

And think of all the time it will save. I've been called and ended up sitting
there for hours on end. It's a foolish waste of everyone's time. Everyone
should report, draw their number, hangout for a bit until they know the total
of jurors and alternates they need for each trial, and Bam call the number and
send the rest home. I figure it should take a couple of hours at most before
there's no more bored disgruntled crowd sitting around.

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Kinnard
>"When the Supreme Court hears the death-penalty case from Georgia, Foster v.
Chatman, No. 14-8349, it could reshape the ways juries are selected.

The case arose from the 1987 trial of Timothy T. Foster, an African-American
facing the death penalty for killing a white woman, Queen Madge White.
Prosecutors worked hard to exclude blacks from the jury.

In notes that did not surface until decades later, they marked the names of
black prospective jurors with a B. They highlighted those names in green. They
circled the word “black” where potential jurors had noted their race on
questionnaires.

They ranked the black prospective jurors in case “it comes down to having to
pick one of the black jurors,” as the prosecution’s investigator put it in a
draft affidavit at the time.

There was no need for that, though. Prosecutors struck all four black
potential jurors."

