Jury Selection

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that, before one piece of evidence is displayed and discussed, the jury, who must evaluate this evidence, are often flawed in their selection for only one reason---race. The author discuses two landmark cases, which ended up in the Supreme Court because of this racial imbalance that tainted the evidence presented: "Swain vs. Alabama" and "Batson vs. Kentucky". The paper relates that, on the other hand, in the OJ Simpson case, a jury with many blacks acquitted him after being urged in the closing arguments to nullify the jury ideal and to vote to acquit because the defendant is black and you, the jury, as blacks, have suffered at the hands of the police.

From the Paper:

"First, "Swain v. Alabama", which arose from the 1962 prosecution of a black man "convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury for raping a white woman in Talladega, Florida Although 26 percent of the people then eligible for jury service in the county were black, no African-American had sat ion a trial jury since at least 1950." When it came time to select the jury that would try the case, however, prosecuting attorneys and sometimes defense attorneys used peremptory challenges to eliminate all of the blacks who were potential jurors. It is interesting to note that sometimes black defendants will instruct their attorneys to exclude blacks, believing that they would want to "show" their white fellow jurors that they could be just as severe on blacks as they could."

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