Exclusion of Blacks from Juries Raises Renewed Scrutiny

This could easily be solved by making a random selection of jurors and alternates from the available pool. have everyone reporting for selection draw a numbered ticket from a hat.

No names, no faces, no questions about what you do for a living, nope, none of that. You get who you asked for, and without the bullshit at the beginning where the lawyer and da (and their jury consultants) work to stack the jury in their favour.

You want peers? Well, any random 12 out of the "random" pool selection ought to about cover it.

And think of all the time it will save. I've been called and ended up sitting there for hours on end. It's a foolish waste of everyone's time. Everyone should report, draw their number, hangout for a bit until they know the total of jurors and alternates they need for each trial, and Bam call the number and send the rest home. I figure it should take a couple of hours at most before there's no more bored disgruntled crowd sitting around.

>"When the Supreme Court hears the death-penalty case from Georgia, Foster v. Chatman, No. 14-8349, it could reshape the ways juries are selected.

The case arose from the 1987 trial of Timothy T. Foster, an African-American facing the death penalty for killing a white woman, Queen Madge White. Prosecutors worked hard to exclude blacks from the jury.

In notes that did not surface until decades later, they marked the names of black prospective jurors with a B. They highlighted those names in green. They circled the word “black” where potential jurors had noted their race on questionnaires.

They ranked the black prospective jurors in case “it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors,” as the prosecution’s investigator put it in a draft affidavit at the time.

There was no need for that, though. Prosecutors struck all four black potential jurors."