The sinister and racist practice that infects death penalty juries | News and Comments

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Anyone accused of a crime is entitled to a jury of their peers. Although this is a fundamental right, it is not the case in death penalty trials. Jury selection in death penalty trials is unconstitutionally discriminatory and exclusive because of a process called death qualification, which prosecutors use to exclude jurors.

Here’s how it works: To serve on a death penalty jury, prospective jurors must tell prosecutors that they’re willing to impose the death penalty. This statement makes them qualified as dead. The characterization of death is as sinister as it sounds, and it’s blatantly racist.

A disproportionate number of black jurors and faith-based jurors, especially Catholics, are barred from death penalty juries. Combined with prosecutors’ use of peremptory strikes or dismissal of jurors without giving a reason, death penalty juries end up being overwhelmingly white, male, and biased in favor of prosecution and death. It should be noted that even though the Constitution prohibits the use of peremptory strikes to dismiss jurors because of their race, prosecutors frequently do so anyway using various evasive tactics.

We challenge the exclusive and racist practice of characterizing death on behalf of two clients Brandon Hill in North Carolina and Dennis Glover in Florida. A hearing on our motion to prohibit this practice in Mr. Hills’ case begins tomorrow.

In both cases, experts conducted studies to find out whether characterization as dead distorted jury composition in the counties where our clients had their trials. It does.

In Duval County, Florida, where Mr. Glover is on trial, a study of 12 capital cases since 2010 (where 11 of 12 people tried were black) involving more than 800 jurors found that black jurors were twice as likely to be dismissed as white jurors due to death disqualification.

In Wake County, North Carolina, where Mr Hill is on trial, a study of the last 10 capital trials found similar results with black jurors again twice as likely as white jurors to be removed from juries capital due to the qualification of death and the use by the prosecutors of peremptory strikes.

The death penalty has a racist history that lives on in the use of the death penalty by prosecutors and the opposition of black communities to the death penalty.

Since the founding of our country, white people could kill, assault or degrade black people for any reason. Courts and law enforcement have upheld this racial hierarchy and racial violence. If black people were not lynched, the deeply flawed judicial process served as a pathway for legal lynchings where all-white juries sentenced black people accused of crimes, often falsely accused to death. The death qualification to exclude black jurors is a legacy of this shameful history.

In the United States, blacks are as underrepresented on juries in the capital as they are overrepresented on death row. More than a third of those on death row in Florida are black, more than half of those on death row in North Carolina are black, and black people are disproportionately represented on the remaining death rows across our country as well than on federal death row.

It’s an endless cycle of discrimination: excluding skeptical black jurors, disproportionately sentencing black people to death with whitewashed juries, instilling distrust in a racist system, and repeating.

Juries are meant to represent the conscience of the communities. But in momentous lawsuits where the stakes couldn’t be higher, our courts exclude entire demographics and entire viewpoints. Not only does this violate the rights of black jurors and faith jurors to serve, but it violates the rights of defendants to have fair trials, like our clients Mr. Hill and Mr. Glover. They are entitled to a fair and representative jury, not a jury unconstitutionally designed to impose death.

UPDATE: On October 21, 2022, Mr. Glover’s case was resolved and he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Mr. Glover’s challenge to characterization as dead remains relevant in other cases in Florida.

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