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Tainted trials

The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Miller-El vs. Dretke indicates that some courts aren't doing enough to prevent racial bias in jury selection.

Racial bias in jury selection is one of those pernicious civil rights violations that may have been outlawed on paper but persists more than we'd like to admit. When African-Americans are excluded from jury service due to invidious discrimination, the black community is denied a role in the justice system, the court system's integrity is compromised and black defendants are denied the right to an impartial jury.

Since the mid 1980s, the U.S. Supreme Court has ordered courts to more vigilantly police this aspect of a fair trial. Prosecutors looking to reject black jurors in a criminal trial must provide credible and sufficient race-neutral reasons for doing so. But it seems that some courts take this duty more seriously than others. In the Texas case of Miller-El vs. Dretke, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that the capital murder conviction of Thomas Miller-El, who is black, should be set aside due to the racial discrimination that contaminated the jury selection process. This was the second time in three years the court stepped in to Miller-El's case. It was forced to do so after the Texas state courts and the lower federal courts refused to acknowledge the obvious pattern of racial bias that tainted the 1986 trial.

It shouldn't take much more than an open pair of eyes to recognize the role race played in Miller-El, where prosecutors used their peremptory challenges to remove 10 out of 11 qualified black members of the jury pool. Prosecutors also requested a convenient reshuffling of the jury pool after, by chance, the first four prospective jurors to be questioned were African-American. And the "neutral" reasons given for the removal of so many potential black jurors were not applied consistently to whites.

Justice David Souter, writing for the 6-3 majority, said the cumulative evidence is "too powerful to conclude anything but discrimination." Somehow, though, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals missed it - twice.

The nation's high court with its limited docket cannot be called upon to repeatedly correct this kind of mischief. The 5th Circuit's refusal to follow the Supreme Court's direction is indicative of the general unwillingness by Texas-area courts to provide criminal defendants with an authentic opportunity to challenge unfair practices at trial. In recent years, the Supreme Court has had to spend an inordinate amount of time reviewing death penalty cases coming out of the state for trial error.

The courts in the region have turned so conservative that apparently even blatant race discrimination is to be tolerated if that means holding on to a conviction. These are not the values our criminal justice system is supposed to embrace.

[Last modified June 18, 2005, 01:36:03]