Dowbrigade

Most of my student lawyers are from countries whose justice systems do not include the concept of a “jury of your peers.” This has prompted several questions about what the concept really means, and how it affects and is affected by jury selection. Hey, you guys! Read the following article from yesterday’s New York Times.

The article asks what constitutes a representative jury, noting that in Puerto Rico’s Federal courts jurors are required to have a fluent understanding of English, a requirement which eliminates up to 75% of the population from jury duty. The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals here in Boston has upheld the requirement. Can you guess why?

The main part of the article concerns the death penalty. The Supreme Court has held that it is lawful to exclude from the jury in capital cases individuals who feel they could not support the death penalty in any situation (although they cannot exclude those who simply have “reservations” about it). Recent research, however, shows that this exclusion produces juries that are more friendly to prosecutors than defendants.

Specifically, capital cases produce juries that 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.

And more white, in that a higher percentage of African-Americans than whites are disqualified by the so called “death qualification…..”

from the New York Times