John Oliver continued his research into the ways in which racism is embedded in the criminal justice system in this week’s main segment Last week last night, his attention focused on each his favorite civic duty. While the right to a trial by a jury of your peers is enshrined in the Sixth Amendment, “the truth is that people of color routine are excluded,” Oliver said, citing a study from the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies that says that ” underrepresentation of the Latino and African American populations exists everywhere. ”Lack of diversity of juries has far-reaching ramifications, not least because studies show that gaps in the persuasion figures between white and black suspects were eliminated then. t the jury pool included only one Black member.
Throughout the segment, Oliver has detailed how jury selection excludes people of color from the very beginning of the process. Jury selection computer programs, often created by private companies that use proprietary algorithms, can make mistakes as hilarious as a 9-year-old jury call twice to people as sinister as 63 percent of eligible Black jurors from the pool due to a coding error. Because 39 of the 50 states do not provide access to jury data, “no one knows how [these mistakes] are, ”said Oliver. “That your justice system could have a massive problem and until a 9-year-old comes up for a murder trial, no one would have any idea.”
And that’s all before potential jurors even appear in court, where prosecutors exclude the Black jurors. Oliver quoted Curtis Flowers’ recently reversed conviction in Mississippi, in which a white district attorney dismissed 41 of 42 prospective Black jurors over six different trials, a move so racist that even Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh could not excuse it: “You know. you’re doing something wrong when it’s so blatant that even Brett Kavanaugh has a problem with it, a man who has done just two good things in his life: make this decision and make it acceptable to scream and scream through your entire job interview. . “
