Tuesday 22 June 2010

Minority under-representation on juries

The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog has a post reporting that there is a continuing problem with "racially skewed" juries in our courts. The post discusses a report (60 page pdf) published recently by the Equal Justice Initiative that found "shocking evidence of racial discrimination in jury selection" in the eight states they studied: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
The blog post says that there is also another challenge in getting minority representation in juries, as recently reported by an Iowa newspaper: potential jurors there are drawn from driver's license and voter lists, but minorities are less likely to be on those lists because, as a court administrator says, "there are people who choose not to vote. There are people who don't have driver's licenses".

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