Events

Guest Speaker: Chloe Deambrogio, Warwick Law School

Title: (Work-In-Progress) 'Racial discrimination in capital jury selection: The illusion of fairness in the practices of Alabama state courts'

Discriminatory practices in capital jury selection are a long-standing feature of the American death penalty process, particularly in the Southern States. In the landmark ruling of Batson v. Kentucky (1986), the US Supreme Court tried to tackle this entrenched practice by banning the state’s use of peremptory challenges to exclude jurors based on racial considerations. Scholars have long recognised the doctrinal deficiencies of Batson, pointing to the difficulties faced by defendants who, to meet Batson’s high burden of proof, must demonstrate that the prosecutor struck a potential juror based on race and then lied about it to the trial court. Less studied is the essential role played by local prosecutors, trial judges, and state appellate courts in maintaining this discriminatory practice, despite the Court’s occasional, if ineffective, efforts to reform. In this paper, I shed new light on this understudied phenomenon by examining: 1) the strategies developed by Alabama prosecutors to continue to exclude ethnic minorities from capital jury service in the decades following Batson, and 2) the arguments used by state appellate courts to affirm death sentences in cases where the circumstances of the voir dire might have warranted a reversal. The aim of the paper is to reveal how legal doctrines and principles can be manipulated to give the impression of procedural fairness and equal protection, while doing little to address the discriminatory practices that continue to pervade the system.