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Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

For starters, we could reinforce the Batson rule [1] and mandate that any jury selected must mirror the racial and sexual makeup of its community, +/- 10%.

Having to prove racial discrimination in jury selection is an absurdly high bar, and usually impossible.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batson_v._Kentucky

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I understand what you're going for, but I think this idea would just reinforce the imaginary walls we use to group humans. The underlying idea is that X-people understand X-people, where X is some arbitrary group, but non-X-people lack the perspective they need. For example, we consider people with black skin to be a group, but not people with blue eyes, or people who can curl their tongues. Let's just work our way toward thinking people are just people instead.

Sure, but let’s not pretend the last millennium didn’t happen or shape the present in critical ways.

How is that in any way relevant? How does that at all mean that black people better understand black people, or justify explicitly selecting a jury on the basis of something arbitrary like skin color?

The problem is that juries without a minority on them absolutely find minorities guilty at a higher rate than when one or more minorities are on the jury.

As the thread below noted, it's not fair to have historical conditions that produced winners (white men, countries with colonies, etc) and then make things more equal by saying "That's all over" and failing to recognize the results of previous injustice that are still embedded in our lives.

I could have offered other suggestions. I specifically said 'juries that roughly reflect their communities in racial and sexual senses'. I don't feel that's an unreasonably burdensome ask in pursuit of Justice.

http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D13...

You might have difficulty empaneling juries if this were a requirement. What makes a good jury goes well beyond racial or sexual makeup. Also, in many places the jury pools don't match the community at large. This approach would therefore have the effect of jeopardizing the right to jury trial without really alleviating injustice.

A more fruitful approach might be to try to make the pools more balanced. Getting more community participation in the justice system seems like a very good thing at multiple levels.

A right to a trial by a racially biased jury isn't much of a right in my opinion.

I'm all for throwing people in jail if they don't want to serve on a jury.

I think we'd do better to, at least at first, start solving some of the reasons why our jury demographics are so skewed. Stronger protections for workers that need time off (there should be no work hardship exemption and employers should be forced to give jurors full pay for the duration of the trial) would be a good start to not discriminate against poorer people who can't take off from work without struggling financially or getting fired. Also, criminal convictions shouldn't disqualify someone after they've served their sentences. The current system disqualifies a disproportionate number of minorities and that leaves predominantly-white juries to convict even more minorities...a self-reinforcing cycle. Also, the SCotUS needs to recommit to the Batson doctrine to prevent prosecutors from dismissing minority jurors based on race.

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