new study by a North Carolina law school is said to prove racial bias in jury selection. The study, by the Wake Forest School of Law, shows that prosecutors remove about 20 percent of African-Americans from jury pools, compared to 10 percent of whites. Meanwhile, defense attorneys skew the other way, removing 22 percent of white jurors and 10 percent of African-Americans. In The New York Times, Wake Forest law professor Ronald Wright breaks down the study:
When the dust settles at the close of jury selection, defense attorneys’ actions in the last leg of the process do not cancel out the combined skewed actions from prosecutors and judges. The consistent result is African-Americans occupying a much smaller percentage of seats in the jury box than they did in the original jury pool.
Wright also offers two "simple solutions" to the issue. You can read his analysis in The Times.
