Batson and The Legacy of Lynchings
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“Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root...”
Swaying in the wind on an October day in 1934, Claude Neal’s body hung from a tree on display in front of the Jackson County courthouse. Days prior, he was taken from his jail cell in Marianna, Florida by an angry white mob. Having been accused of raping and killing a white woman, Lola Cannidy, Claude Neal was tortured and hung by his neck until he was strangled to death. People gathered to watch the lynching, in the name of “justice” for Lola.
Claude Neal’s tragic death, which is detailed in James McGovern’s Anatomy of a Lynching, is significant to me because he was my grandfather’s cousin and because I am a capital defense attorney. Because of my work, I am often confronted by the many historical connections between the death penalty and lynchings. One of the most clear and lasting legacies of the torrid, bloody lynchings that occurred throughout the South in the late 1800s and early 1900s is the fact that today, hundreds of individuals—who are disproportionately Black—face the prospect of a death sentence without a fair trial. While Black men are no longer lynched before all-white crowds gathered on the courthouse lawn, Black men are all-too-often condemned to death by all-white juries that are produced by prosecutors’ deliberate exclusion of people of color, particularly Black people, from jury service.
This past Saturday marked the 30th anniversary of the United State Supreme Court’s decision in Batson v. Kentucky, which prohibits the intentional exclusion of prospective jurors from service on an individual case based on race. The importance of this landmark decision cannot be overstated because, as the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall once commented, “Illegal and unconstitutional jury selection procedures cast doubt on the integrity of the whole judicial process. They create the appearance of bias in the decision of individual cases, and they increase the risk of actual bias as well.” Peters v. Kiff, 407 U.S. 493, 502 (1972). And contemporary studies bear out the truth of Justice Marshall’s analysis: compared to diverse juries, all-white juries spend less time deliberating, make more errors, rely on implicit biases and consider fewer alternative perspectives. Interestingly, studies have shown the effects of diversity were not wholly attributable to the specific performance of Black participants. In fact, the mere presence of individuals from other racial or ethnic groups improves the likelihood of a more well-rounded discussion among jurors.
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