Why Is It So Easy for Prosecutors to Strike Black Jurors?
.. A consensus soon formed that the Batson remedy was toothless. In a 1996 opinion, an Illinois appellate judge, exasperated by “the charade that has become the Batson process,” catalogued some of the flimsy reasons for striking jurors that judges had accepted as “race-neutral”: too old, too young; living alone, living with a girlfriend; over-educated, lack of maturity; unemployed, employed as a barber; and so on. The judge joked, “New prosecutors are given a manual, probably entitled, ‘Handy Race-Neutral Explanations’ or ‘20 Time-Tested Race-Neutral Explanations.’”
To state the obvious, black people are more likely to have been targeted or abused by police; to be affected by the extreme racial disparities in arrests, incarceration, and the death penalty; and to understand that crimes against black victims are prosecuted less vigorously than those against whites. All things being equal, a prosecutor has reason to think that a black juror is less likely to side with the government against a black defendant than a white one.
.. Richard Bourke, who has worked on Batson appeals as the director of the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, suggested that the most powerful, realistic reform would be to have states track the racial makeup of jury selection in the same way they track the racial statistics of traffic stops.