The big problem with how we pick juries

Key Takeaways

in october of 2014 jason van dyke a white chicago police officer shot and killed laquan mcdonald a black teenager a year after the shooting the city released the graphic video that captured the incident it shows mcdonald walking down a busy roadway holding a knife as he walks away from the officers van dyke shoots him 16 times the response to the release of the footage was swift and widespread chicago residents protested the police chief was fired the state's attorney was voted out a justice department investigation unearthed a pattern of excessive deadly force and racial bias among chicago police officers and for the first time in more than 30 years a chicago police officer faced murder charges while police officers who end up in court often prefer a judge to hear their case van dijk opted for a jury but here's the thing about that jury it didn't look like the population of cook county where the shooting took place in a county where almost a quarter of people are black there was only one black juror when it comes to the justice system in america race has always been part of the equation so what happens when a jury of peers doesn't actually look like our peers a good citizen will perform basic civic duties your duty to serve on the jury goes with your right to trial by jury here's how jury selection works first prospective jurors are picked for duty out of a large pool usually a list of registered voters or licensed drivers then comes a process called vardir or to speak the truth prospective jurors are questioned by lawyers on both sides they're looking for bias like in this scene in the devil's advocate where a lawyer is trying to gauge the jury for bias against bankers do you think is a juror you would be able to set aside any prior opinion you might hold about the savings and loan industry if a lawyer has reason to believe a juror will be biased they can ask the judge to dismiss the juror with cause each side can also strike a certain number of jurors without giving a reason these are called peremptory challenges and this is where things get tricky while lawyers aren't technically allowed to use these challenges to discriminate on the basis of race or sex that doesn't mean they don't try like in this scene in the tv show how to get away with murder we have to look for jurors who are prone to distrust authority what are some of the signifiers of this number one is race there's a larger distrust of police among black americans you don't call the police in my neighborhood the racial balance of a jury can impact the verdict studies have shown that all white juries are harsher on black defendants make more errors and discuss less of the case facts and in another study in cases with a black defendant and white victim having one or more black male jurors lowered the likelihood of a death sentence by a lot a difficult day for jurors in the o.j simpson murder trial it's why in high profile racially charged trials like that of o.j simpson so much attention was given to the fact that the jury had nine black members on it the jury has spoken and simpson was acquitted and not guilty of the crime of murder there's also the disturbing case of emmett till in 1955 two mississippi men roy bryant and j.w milam were accused of kidnapping and brutally murdering a 14 year old black boy named emmett till brian's wife alleged that the boy had touched her hand and waist and whistled at her in a grocery store emmett till's body was found days later in the tallahatchie river beaten shot and tied to a cotton gin with a barbed wire bryant and milam were arrested and charged with murder but the trial of bryant and milam would be decided by a jury a jury that consisted of 12 white men despite multiple witnesses seeing the two men take the boy and one that saw the back of milam's truck dripping with blood a jury of 12 white neighbors of the defendants reached the verdict after one hour and five minutes of deliberations the men would walk free decades later brian's wife who made that first accusation against emmett till recanted her story fast forward 30 years from the case of emmett till and all white juries still weren't a thing of the past in the 1986 case batson vs kentucky a prosecutor used his peremptory challenges to remove all four black jurors from the pool the defendant's appeal made it all the way to the supreme court and won today if one side suspects the other using peremptory strikes to racially discriminate they can file what's called a batson challenge but the problem is yeah so batson is pretty much widely regarded as a failure if a lawyer accuses the other side of excluding a juror because of race the judge then has to decide whether it's discriminatory the accused would have to come up with a reason any reason that's race neutral for why they don't want the juror courts have really allowed kind of any reason for example like i an attorney might say well i struck all the people who seemed suspicious of the police um and so that would on its face be racially neutral but it still kind of allows for that disproportionate impact you can see that in this leaked 1987 training video in which attorney jack mcmahon explains how to exclude black people and get away with it there's the blacks from a low income areas are less likely to convict and as a result you don't want those people on your jewelry uh batson versus kentucky i'm sure you've all become aware of that best way to avoid any problems with it is to protect yourself when you do have a black jar you question them at length and on this little sheet that you have mark something down that you can articulate say well you had a had a the woman had a kid about the same age as the defendant and i thought she'd be sympathetic to him or she's unemployed and i just don't like unemployed people because i find they're not too stable this kind of strategy has led to a pattern of excluding black jurors across the country in north carolina between 1990 and 2010 prosecutors struck black jurors two and a half times as often as non-black jurors another report found half of all juries that delivered death sentences in houston county alabama between 2005 and 2009 were all white the other half had a single black juror even though the county is 27 percent black and ann eisenberg did a study that showed the prosecution struck 35 of black jurors in south carolina who made it through the vardyr process compared to 12 of white jurors i asked a colleague of mine when i finished this study i said you know okay i've shown this you know what of it now it doesn't there's so much evidence and he said yeah proving that racial discrimination infects jury selection is like proving that the sun rises but there might be signs of change in the case of jason van dijk the chicago police officer who shot laquan mcdonald a majority white jury convicted him of murder it was chicago's first murder conviction of a police officer in 50 years we the jury by the defendant jason van dyke guilty of second degree murder they found him guilty of second-degree murder a lesser charge and guilty of all 16 counts of aggravated battery one for each shot at laquan mcdonald thanks for watching there's a lot i couldn't fit into the video like how do we fix the problem of racial discrimination and jury selection over the years lawyers have suggested solutions like choosing from a bigger jury pool of underrepresented people that aren't on voter registration lists or driver's license lists or getting rid of preemptory challenges altogether it's a complicated problem to solve but there are procedural tweaks that can make the system a lot more fair