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Death-Qualified Juries

Excellent article about race and death penalty-qualified juries in today's New York Times, Facing a Jury of (Some of) One's Peers. We learned a new phrase from it--"bleaching of the jury"--

About the death penalty trial Ashcroft is forcing in Puerto Rico, 2 significant facts:

1. People who are not fluent in English are excluded from serving on federal juries/ In Puerto Rico, this means 1/2 to 2/3 of the country's residents are ineligible to serve.

2. Since capital jurors must be "death qualified", or willing to impose the death penalty in an appropriate case, death penalty opponents are not allowed to serve. Puerto Rico doesn't have a death penalty, it's against the Consitution there. At least another 11 to 17% of residents will be disqualified on this ground.

So what's wrong with death-qualified juries?

It has been shown to produce juries that are notably friendlier to prosecutors than jurors in murder cases where the death penalty is not sought.
Studies have shown that juries in capital cases are more likely to believe that a defendant's failure to testify indicates guilt, more hostile to the insanity defense, more mistrustful of defense attorneys and less concerned about the possibility of convicting innocent people than a random sample of the population.

"There is a major bleaching of juries," said Samuel R. Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan. "Many more African-Americans are excluded than whites. The biggest demographic predictor of attitudes toward the death penalty is race."

We like this quote from former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1968:

Whatever else may be said of capital punishment," Justice Potter Stewart wrote... "it is at least clear that its imposition by a hanging jury cannot be squared with the Constitution."

In 1986, now Chief Justice William Rehnquist decided otherwise:

The Constitution, he said, forbids only the exclusion of distinctive groups like blacks and women. Barring groups of people defined only by shared attitudes is permissible. Justice Rehnquist rejected alternatives that might have addressed some concerns, like separate juries for the guilt and penalty phases of a trial or a single jury with extra jurors who could be weeded out based on their attitudes toward executions if a penalty phase was needed. The Supreme Court has since held that jurors who say they would automatically impose the death penalty for some crimes may also be excluded.

We'll end with this quote from former AUSA Jamie Orenstein, one of the principal prosecutors in the Oklahoma City bombing cases, now in private civil practice:

One of the basic ideas about the death penalty is that it's supposed to reflect the moral judgment of the community." Excluding opponents of the death penalty from capital juries makes gauging that moral judgment more difficult.

< Turkmen v. Ashcroft: Lawsuit by Mistreated Detainees | Restoring Voting Rights to Felons >
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