Juries: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Continuing with our main story

tonight

is about jury service. Hey, subpoena, that's one of the things you least want to find in the mail, other than maybe a bill or a human toe and, please, a pinky. Call me when you're serious enough to send a middle pig then maybe we'll talk business complaining about jury duty has long been a beloved pastime in America just watch this call us a local 90's TV show delight They put the presenter with his complaints in this corral, they call it the jury meeting room, yes, the jury, the jar, the jar, they put you in this jar with three or 300 other people for a whole

week

, oh man, and I I imagine it's like being in prison, only the jealousy is much better because Joe is much cleaner and has much more. better lighting oh and we have to pay for our own food and we can't go out we don't have free HBO we can't talk as much and we don't get medical care and you don't get conjugal visits you don't get any of that you don't get any of that now he actually he's right you don't get conjugal visits while waiting to be called for jury duty although judging by that call being on jury duty isn't that's great as a major obstacle in that department as far as not getting HBO I don't know what he's complaining about there, they don't even give me free HBO and I'm actively ruining it now that the man Greg was a regular caller to that show. and I know this because we were curious about it after watching that clip and it turns out it's a lot, for example, Greg has a website where you can find classic gregasms like environmentalism is bad or baptists are the homo grenade pin, by the way , gregisms.

It's not even a term I made up, it's an actual section of his website. Honestly, we can dedicate the rest of this show to Greg, but unfortunately we have to move on because the important thing about jury service is that you know, just one more thing. about Greg, he's been tweeting, it's almost time to have a big hashtag

week

end. Everyone who is with me every Friday for the

last

many Fridays and reads the room. Greg, no one has great hashtag weekends anymore. We are all sitting at home watching the days blur by. in a miserable soup of hashtags, but while it may seem cliché, serving on a jury is actually an essential civic duty, the right to a trial by an impartial jury of your peers is enshrined in the sixth amendment of the constitution, but The truth is that while their peers are supposed to be chosen from a representative sample of society.

People of color are routinely excluded according to a study of 14 federal district courts. Representation of the Latino and African American populations is ubiquitous, which is a problem with enormous implications for

juries

. The social psychologist set up mock cases in which some jurors were all white and others were racially diverse and found that the diverse ones acted more fairly and deliberated more comprehensively in this study. They raised more facts from the trial. They discuss a broader range of information. They discuss the information more accurately, in fact, when discussing the facts of the case, they are more willing to have uncomfortable conversations about controversial topics such as those involving race and racial profiling.

Yes, it turns out that jurors are kind of like presidents of the Spokane Washington chapter of the NAACP when Things that are entirely white tend to go wrong quickly and this is reflected in the real world. Researchers examining felony trials in Florida found that all-white

juries

convict black defendants 16 percentage points more often than white defenders, but that gap conviction rate is eliminated by complete when the group includes at least one black member and that's one of those facts you probably assumed was true even though you wish it wasn't like the fact that dogs don't really like music or that Sean Penn's new wife is a year younger than your daughter, so

tonight

let's take a look at why juries are often unrepresentative and what we can do about it.

The entire process begins with what's called a jury lineup, a pool of potential jurors in a community you used to use. to be a real wheel and for many years blacks were explicitly excluded from them and even after the civil rights act of 1875 said that juries could not be discriminated against on the basis of race, many officials still found ways to eliminate them, like printing their names. on different colored paper so that they could be avoided during the supposedly random drawings and although fortunately that no longer happens, our current system has many flaws that can end up having a similar result, for example nowadays the jury wheels are usually ready computerized data compiled from voter registration. and driver's license registrations, but there's a big problem there as this public defender in New Orleans explains that not everyone is registered to vote and not everyone has a car, you know, has a driver's license.

The problem is that when we use voter registration or DMV records, we're probably excluding about 35 percent of New Orleans, 35 of the people are excluded there and being registered to vote and owning a car doesn't affect whether you're qualified to serve on a jury, it only affects how much money you are likely to spend on bumper stickers. Stickers think of them as Twitter traffic, that's not a compliment and the exclusions don't end there. Most states ban people with felony convictions and withdraw payment. People with incredibly low incomes can't afford to participate, which disproportionately excludes people of color is so inherent that the system is already biased and that's before you even get into the mistakes that systems can make. jury summons, which, to be fair, can sometimes be quite fun.

I have jerry duty. I said: what is jerry duty? summon jerry's jury duty if you are chosen then you go to the judge and then tell him if they are guilty or not guilty yes jacob has jerry duty and while i can't believe he found casey anthony not guilty that's what That he and his Gerry decided and we just have to do it. I live with it, but some mistakes are significantly less fun - for example, in Connecticut it turned out that its jury selection computer program had accidentally read the d in Hartford to mean deceased, so for almost three years it never summoned anyone from Hartford or even New Britain, the second largest country. city ​​in that district because their list of names had been accidentally lost and never entered into the program and the thing is that those two missing cities represented 63 of the African Americans in the district and 68 of the Hispanic population, which is horrible because if we go To forget a town in Connecticut, why not forget Danbury?

Because, and this is true, Dan Berry, from its charming railroad museum to its historic half-stone castle, Danbury Connecticut can eat my entire ass. I know exactly three things about Danbury, USA today ranked it second. The best city to live in 2015, it was once the center of the American hat industry and if you're from there, you have a standing invitation to take a beating from John Oliver. Kids include you now that Harford's mistake was made by the government's own system, but many courts actually outsource the selection of their juries to companies like these, which promise to carry out the process cheaper and more efficiently , but private companies can be surprisingly unreliable.

Take what happened outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a black man was tried by an all-white judge. gems taken from a pool of 200 jurors without a single black person after the company handling jury selection accidentally excluded ZIP codes where 90 of its black residents lived, then there's Allen County, Indiana, where this company had a system that was programmed to run through an alphabetical list of municipalities and stopped when it reached 10,000 names, unfortunately it turned out that 75 of the African Americans in that county live in Wayne Township towards the end of the alphabet , meaning they had about half the chance of being included on a jury that a truly random system would have produced, so once again literacy fails us.

I've been saying this for years. It's an abc supremacist system that doesn't respect the better end of the alphabet because think about it, z has all the hotties zayn zoe zendaya zac efron and of course half donkey half zebra zonkeys all sexes now the extent of that Indiana era only came about when A man who had been convicted there sued over the makeup of his jury, and his attorney pointed out to the state supreme court how lax the design process had been. Not a glitch. Not a glitch or computer error. These are determinations of programming these were codes these were determinations that the programmer put into the program he didn't not a gargle virus came and made the program malfunction it was bad because He made these decisions and they could have easily been programmed another way.

This was a part-time college student. That's true, the county jury system was originally designed by a college student whose previous job, by the way, had been working in a convenience store and look, there are a lot of them. of jobs that people with experience in head photography are qualified for, for example cleaning bong resin off an Ikea sofa cushion or going for a late-night snack at 7-eleven and just get 40 of what everyone asked for, I'm just not sure that scheduling A county's official jury list is one of those jobs and whether the mistakes in these schedules were deliberate or just sloppy, the result is the same and I would love to Tell you that mistakes like these are rare, but the truth is that no one knows how common they are.

Do we only know the examples I've mentioned so far because of lawsuits that

last

ed years? Private providers often do not disclose details about their systems, claiming their algorithms are a trade secret, and 39 out of 50 states do not provide public access to the jury. data, so their justice system could have a huge problem and until a nine year old shows up for a murder trial, no one would have any idea and this is all before the jurors show up for selection, at which point that things can get even worse. Because prosecutors tend to exclude black jurors sometimes because of implicit bias but sometimes because of a bias that is quite explicit, watch this Philadelphia prosecutor address a room full of prosecutors in a leaked training video from the decade of 1980 that explains which jurors might want to avoid, another factor.

I will tell you that if you know that when you select blacks again you don't want the truly educated again, this applies to all races, you don't want smart people, uh and again, but if you're sitting down and you're going to select blacks, you want older blacks, in my experience, black women, young black girls, are very bad, uh, there is an antagonism, I guess maybe because they are oppressed in two aspects, they have two minorities, they are women and they are black and that is why they are oppressed in two areas and somehow they want to take it out on someone and you don't want you to be okay first, any white person who uses the word black as a noun and not an adjective is pretty suspicious, add that mustache and suddenly it feels like a Spike period piece Read and even leaving aside the bigotry there, the only time it's acceptable to say we don't want smart people is in a training manual for selling lularoe because if your business model is selling 5,000 ugly leggings on Facebook to people who hated you in high school, so yes, you want to eliminate smart people, now we contacted that prosecutor who was very upset saying that everyone had tried in some way to make this racist. although she agreed that the best jury is by race, slightly undermined by the fact that she just heard him say that young black girls are very bad and a subsequent review of the felony cases he conducted found that he had eliminated to black jurors at such a high level.

Rate the odds of this happening by chance were a thousand trillion and that guy is not an isolated case. Recent studies in North Carolina and Louisiana found that prosecutors struck black jurors at two and three times the rate of white jurors, and if you're wondering how they could do that, it's probably worth knowing that in a trial lawyers They have two ways to dismiss jurors. The first is the so-called challenge, of course, that is where they can show that a jury cannot be impartial because of some connection to the trial or because they were somehow unfit to serve the second is aperemptory challenge in which they can eliminate a limited number of jurors without explanation, although since a 1986 supreme court ruling they cannot exclude jurors solely on the basis of race, is something that this hln host explains in an almost aggressively literal what happens is that the prosecution and defense each have 10 jurors that they can reject for any reason or no reason at all, unless they believe the other side is playing the race card and then they can challenge that. preemptive challenge okay, I have a lot of questions and absolutely none of them are about preemptive challenges first, why use the loaded term by playing the race card?

Second, why do you imply that it means acting in a racist way when it doesn't, but most do? It's important to know how long that guy walked with that race card in his suit pocket, was it just for show or does he always walk with it in case he has to explain peremptory challenges to someone and if so, does he ever goes? to pay for something, he accidentally pulled out his career card and then said, "Oops, that's not my wallet, that's my career card," to the complete bewilderment of the cashier, plus, how did he get that card?

Did he make it himself? Because it would be weird, but it might actually be weirder if he asked someone else to do it for him, that would mean he would ask the producer. Hey, can you make me a race card for my segment on jury selection? To which she probably said: What do you mean? and he said. you know, like a physical card that says race card and then the producer said why and he said because I'm trying to explain that lawyers play the race card when they hit jurors, which the producer said, but can't you just? say the phrase by playing the race card or actually don't say it at all and he said no at all so a production assistant had to spend 20 minutes printing the words race card on a red card.

Here's how it came about and what happened to you after the show? Did he throw it away or put it on his desk in case he ever needed it again? And if so, has anyone ever walked by and said hey, what's that you responded to? Oh, that's just my race card like it's a normal thing to say or have and finally, and I know this isn't the most important thing, why does it say race card? It's already a card, shouldn't it just say race because it doesn't? What you're actually holding there is technically a race card and if so, what does that mean?

I have a lot of questions about this and I know we don't have time, but I guess my broader point is that there are two ways for lawyers. eliminate jurors and hln is a deeply strange network, but what the supreme court said that you can't eliminate jurors based on race, it turns out that's a pretty easy rule to get around, all you have to do is do is find some reason. Short of running to punch a juror and then doing it anyway, remember that the lawyer you saw earlier was speaking after the ruling was handed down and was openly instructing prosecutors on how not to get caught, say, punching three black guys to start with the first three. people and then it's like the defense attorney makes an objection saying you're hitting black, well you're not going to be able to go back and say oh yeah, make up something about why he did it, write it down right then and there, so sometimes under that line, you may want to ask those people more questions, which gives you more ammunition to explain why you are hitting them and not because of race.

Wow, it's pretty strange to see a government official so blatantly teaching people how to do it. doing something illegal is like how to get away with murder was an educational series where viola davis explains how to literally get away with murder, something he would completely crush because of the way he would gladly watch multiple seasons of her describing it in vivid detail. how to dismember a corpse and dissolve the body parts in acid and look to this day prosecutors use a wide variety of reasons to attack black jurors, some of which are simply ridiculous, like saying the jurors were too young , too old, single, divorced, religious or non-religious. lived in a poor part of town had a hyphenated last name showed poor posture or was surly, disrespectful, or talkative, in fact, I just listened to this public defender describe a jury strike he once saw I had an African American woman as a juror who she was actually excluded because she was wearing what is called a puffer coat, yes she was excluded for wearing a puffer coat and a jacket should never be an acceptable reason to exclude someone from a jury unless it's the one Post Malone wore on the American Music Awards.

You're supposed to jump out of a cake at a mariachi-themed gender reveal party and if you want to see how far prosecutors are willing to go, just look at the multiple murder trials of Curtis Flowers in Mississippi, his case went as far as final. Supreme Court that decided that his prosecutor had repeatedly and blatantly attempted to whitewash the jury and that that opinion was written by perhaps the last judge one would expect. Judge Brett Kavanaugh wrote that a white Mississippi prosecutor's goal was for an all-white jury to decide the fate of a black man charged with murder that is unconstitutional the court's newest judge said District Attorney Doug Evans made a tireless and determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals was curtis flores sixth trial for the same quadruple murder kavanaugh pointed out a pattern that Evans had eliminated 41 of the 42 potential black jurors during the six trials 41 of 42 jurors you know that you're doing something wrong when it's so blatant that even brett kavanaugh has a problem with it a man who has done exactly two good things in his life this decision and making it acceptable to spend the entire job interview screaming and crying and it wasn't just not how often the prosecutor hit the black jurors, but how blatantly he did it because, while on average he asked the white jurors who were seated a question he asked the black jurors, he hit 29 and how they do him to someone so many questions about anything that are too many even for a first date, who is desperately trying to keep the conversation going, let's see, I asked him where he grew up and what he does. for work if you like your job if you have siblings if your siblings are older or younger what would you like to do for fun what kind of music do you like what else is there do you like rakes and a possible jury in one of curtis?

The flower trials felt pretty clear why she had been hit, they just told us they didn't need us, I think they might have assumed that since I was black I was going to agree that he was innocent just because of the color of his skin , but actually he would have listened to the evidence and had an open ear, he was actually eager to serve. Look, it's ridiculous to assume that a jury will be biased just because the defendant is the same race, of course a black person can be biased. when the accused is black in the same way that I could be impartial if the accused were an owl, to suggest otherwise is extremely insulting not only to me but to all owls and these decisions have consequences.

Curtis Flowers spent 20 years on death row and is currently out on bail awaiting a possible seventh trial, so all in all, it's pretty clear that from how we decide who serves to how the list, going through who we let the lawyers select, we are making fun of the phrase a jury of your peers because who exactly are you the defendant's peers or the prosecutor's peers? That's a pretty big difference and as we've seen the impact of having people in a jury room who can talk about what it's like to be black in America and how that might affect your relationship with law enforcement can be hugely beneficial and Yes, that might make a prosecutor's job a little more difficult, but the role of a court is not to make things easier by having cases heard only by a group of white people or by using the appropriate collective name for that. whole foods, I'm serious, try it with a sentence, look at that flock of geese flying over abigails whole foods, so how do we fix this right?

There are four basic steps we could take and expand the jury list so that it does not exclude large Some sectors of the community have suggested using income tax lists, for example, to make that data public, so that we can see if there were errors in compiling potential jurors. process behind preemptive challenges to make it more difficult in practice to select jurors by race, and while yes, this is a lot of work, it is worth it because, as we have discussed before on this program, all the cogs in the Criminal justice systems are unfairly biased against people of color, from policing to bail, public defender shortages, punitive sentencing, incarceration and prison re-entry, and this is another one to add to that depressing list because right now, too often, our current system systematically eliminates a qualified person who really wants to serve and leaves someone who aggressively doesn't because they can't watch hbo and the jewel box you have