Supreme Court applies socialistic “disparate impact” analysis to murder juries

Because racial and ethnic groups differ in all kinds of significant ways, applying an objective standard to a racially mixed population will necessary have a racially disparate result. For example, if prosecutors seek jurors who are not prejudiced against imposing the death penalty on black defendants, they will tend to end up with juries with a smaller percentage of blacks on them than in the society as a whole. Yet on the basis of such a racially non-representative jury, the U.S. Supreme Court has just thrown out a death penalty conviction in Texas. The Court claims that prosecutors deliberately excluded blacks. But, since it is true that blacks are reluctant to convict a black (especially when the victim was white), how else do you get a fair jury, other than by ending up with a jury that has a less than representative number of blacks? The Supreme Court’s logic leads to a “multicultural” justice system.

Fortunately, the dissent, by Clarence Thomas, got it right. As reported in the New York Times:

In a dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that Texas prosecutors had offered enough evidence that exclusions were made for reasons other than race.

For instance, the state’s explanation that jurors were struck based on their hostility to the death penalty is plausible, and the alleged racial motivation behind prosecutors’ decision to shuffle the jury pool is only speculative, wrote Thomas, the court’s only black member.

”In view of the evidence actually presented to the Texas courts, their conclusion that the state did not discriminate was eminently reasonable,” Thomas wrote in an opinion joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Antonin Scalia.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 13, 2005 02:37 PM | Send