Lack Of Diverse Jury Pools In The Us Criminal Justice System

Name Course Professor Date Lack of Diverse Jury Juries have existed in the criminal justice system for the last six centuries with fundamental changes have happened over time. The criminal justice system in the United States has experienced growing concerns of under-representation of black and ethnic minorities. The lack of diversity in jury pools is taunted with the exclusion of people of color for serious criminal cases which is thought to undermine the credibility and reliability. The underlying assumption is that under-representation of the people of color affects the jury outcomes. Essentially, there are concerns on whether the court system treats fairly and in a just manner the needs of the diverse and multicultural society in the United States. The issue of jury trials has an effect on the outcome of criminal and capital cases which has made the composition of the jury to be highly controversial. This essay seeks to look at the diversity of the jury pools in the United States criminal justice system. Moreover, it will at how the exclusion of the people of color from serious criminal and capital cases is affecting the credibility of the criminal justice system. It will draw references from cases in just Mercy on the account of biases in the jury determination process, lack of required documents for the selection of jury due to lack of voting rights and the deliberate exclusion of people of color by judges on stereotype basis. The United States jury sermons depend on the voter and such other rolls which is not fully inclusive when assembling a diverse jury with people of color and other minorities being under-represented in this lists. In areas where only a small population of the people of color voted, only a small pool of people eligible for a jury is available for selection. This results in the selection of a limited number of people. (Abramson, 23). Moreover, more problems arise when the jury source list is not updated from time to time to include new eligible people in the probable bracket of selection. This problem is further complicated by the fact that selection is done on random basis thus only a few people of color get to be selected from the limited number provided. Where a list of is created randomly, there is a prevalent use of the fifth letter alphabet scheme to facilitate random selection that has a 40% chance of picking on Jewish names. This leads to the overrepresentation of the Jewish people and the consequent under-representation of the people of color (Hans and Vidmar, 86). Moreover, these lists are marred with an improper merging of names by eliminating cases of duplicate names. This gives people twice the probability of being in jury pools. This has an overall impact of lack of racial diversity in the United States jury pools with sections of disadvantaged people such as the people of color being unrepresented. Strauder challenged a statute that excluded the people of color from serving on the jury in 1880. The Strauder versus West Virginia case had the Supreme Court held that excluding the people of color from serving g in the jury. This, however, did not have an impact on the inclusion of black people in jury pools as they were not allowed to participate in elections. This meant that there existed the ju...