Study: Blacks Stricken From Juries in Southern States

(June 2) -- Black Americans are being stricken from Southern juries -- especially in cases of capital punishment -- because they live in poor neighborhoods, chew gum or are thought to have "low intelligence," according to a new report.

The two-year study published today by the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative found "shocking evidence of racial discrimination" in jury pool selection across eight Southern states.

"We are undermining the credibility of the entire criminal justice system," Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative, told AOL News in a phone interview today.

After studying jury selection pools in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee, the Equal Justice Initiative found that blacks who are legally qualified to serve as jurors are being excluded from jury pools for superficial reasons that violate civil rights law.

In 2004, for example, a potential black juror in Louisiana was removed from the pool because the prosecutor thought he "looked like a drug dealer," the report said. In South Carolina, a prosecutor was allowed to eliminate one black juror because the man reportedly "shucked and jived" as he walked.

Striking jurors because of their race is illegal. In the 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors cannot provide explicitly racial reasons for striking a juror. But Donald E. Wilkes, a law professor at The University of Georgia who specializes in criminal justice and procedure, said such discrimination can be hard to prove.

"So as long as the prosecutor can come up with some ostensibly neutral or non-racial reason for challenging the black person, he can do so without much difficulty," Wilkes told Aol News in a phone interview Wednesday.

"It's a secretive process in which they deny what they are actually doing," he said. "Whatever the rules are prohibiting racial discrimination in jury selection, it continues to happen."

Stevenson says the law leaves too much room for interpretation and in many cases is not enforced.

"Given the kind of enforcement that we've seen over the last 20 years, we will have to strengthen the law," Stevenson said.

According to the report, prosecutors who exclude jurors because of their race are rarely punished.

"There are no sanctions, there are no fines," Stevenson said. "They've made excluding people on the basis of race a policy that they're not ashamed of."

Wilkes said prosecutors can "pretty much act with impunity" in jury selection, and are rarely subjected to reprimand or discipline by bar associations.

And so, decades after the civil rights movement swept across the South, many black men accused of murder continue to face all-white juries in counties with a significant black population. In Alabama, appellate courts have found discrimination in jury selection in 25 death penalty cases.

For example, Alabama's Houston County is 27 percent black, but from 2005 to 2009 local prosecutors struck 80 percent of blacks qualified to serve on juries in capital punishment cases, leaving half of the juries all white and the rest with only one black member. The Houston County District Attorney's Office did not return calls for comment today.

In Louisiana's Jefferson Parish, prosecutors are three times more likely to eliminate blacks from juries on criminal cases than they are whites, according to a 2003 report from the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center. The district attorney's office in Jefferson Parish did not immediately return calls for comment either.

Stevenson said the potential jurors interviewed by the Equal Justice Initiative for the report were emotional when they found out why they had been eliminated. "People were really outraged and deeply disturbed to hear the things that had been said about them," Stevenson said. "A lot of these reasons for excluding these jurors are quite insulting and demeaning."

But not all of them are surprised. The Rev. Bernard Martin, 72, has lived most of his life in Elmore, Ala., yet has never been selected for jury duty. In 1999, he joined a class-action lawsuit with the Equal Justice Initiative that claimed black residents were underrepresented on juries in Autauga County.

In a phone interview with AOL News, Martin said it was hardly a shock to hear that blacks continue to be excluded from Southern juries because of their race.

"That's just the way of life here," he said. "You see a little change for a minute and then things slide right back."