A Jury Of Whose Peers?

Our Justice system was intended to give the accused a fair judge and a jury of their peers. Unfortunately the latter may not be the case (and if the judge was Gerald Garson you didn't have the former either) in Manhattan. A Citizen Action study showed that the make up of jury pools in the city vastly underrepresented minorities of all groups.

From 1010 WINS:

Three out of four people who show up for jury duty in Manhattan's courts are white, even though they represent about half of the borough's population, Citizen Action of New York said Wednesday.

"Our survey showed that jury pools have a much higher percentage of whites than their share of the population, while blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and mixed race people are enormously underrepresented," Bob Cohen, Citizen Action policy director and the report's lead author, said in a statement. "This means that defendants in criminal cases and plaintiffs in civil proceedings ... can't be sure they're going to get a fair result from the courts."

The report was based on a visual survey of 14,429 people who responded to a jury summons in Manhattan from November 2006 through February 2007. The survey was conducted in the jury pool room.

Although the jury selection process may help to make a trial more fair, ideally it should be that way from the time summons are issued till the jury is seated. Citizens Action wants the system to be reformed by using city directories as the source of potential jurors as well as updating lists to take in account the increased mobility of New Yorkers. This fix-it should be a no-brainer, lets see if the courts can make it happen.