RALEIGH -- The Wake County public defender asked a Superior Court judge this week to dismiss an entire jury, saying too few blacks were in the pool of potential jurors for the murder trial of a Garner mother accused of killing her toddler son.
Judge Ripley Rand rejected the challenge filed by Bryan Collins, Wake County's chief public defender, in the trial of Sherita Nicole McNeil. But the exchange shows some of the difficulties that defense lawyers and prosecutors have seating a racially diverse jury that mirrors the community.
The challenge came a week after two Michigan State University law school researchers released findings from a detailed, comprehensive study they are conducting on race and the death penalty in North Carolina. The study not only examined 5,800 cases that were eligible for the death penalty from 1990 through 2009, it also looked at jury selection.
Law professors Catherine Grosso and Barbara O'Brien found that more than 40 percent of the defendants on North Carolina's death row were sentenced to death by a jury that was either all-white or included only one person of color. The researchers found that in selection of juries, prosecutors statewide struck qualified blacks from the potential jury pool at more than twice the rate at which they struck whites.
McNeil, a mother from Garner accused of killing her 19-month-old son and then concealing his death in the fall of 2009, does not face the death penalty. Nevertheless, Collins said he was troubled by the lack of racial diversity in the pool of Wake County residents called to the courthouse Monday to potentially sit as a jury of her peers.
When making his challenge, Collins pointed out that only three of the potential jurors in a pool of 30 were black, and two had been dismissed before all 12 jury members had been seated.
In 2008, Collins argued, Wake County's population was 20 percent black, double the percentage in the first potential jury pool for McNeil's trial.
"I'm arguing that 10 percent is not a fair cross-section," Collins told Rand.
Random selection
Lorrin Freeman, Wake County's clerk of Superior Courts, said selection of potential jurors is random.
Counties develop lists from voter registration and driver's license rosters and do not know the race of any individual. Names are fed into a computer that is programmed to randomly select lists of potential jurors.
Those potential jurors are then sent out in groups to courtrooms throughout the courthouse. Race is not considered when pulling names from the list.
"The whole process is a random-selection process," Freeman said.
In ruling against Collins, Rand said the defense counsel had not shown any intentional exclusion of jurors based on race.
Defense lawyers say racially diverse juries seem to deliberate longer. Polling of jurors after trials shows that racial diversity can add cultural dimensions to a jury's discussions that might not have happened otherwise.
But Freeman, Wake County District Attorney Colon Willoughby and others say they think the justice system works best when jury selection is based on random selection.
Some days, Willoughby said, the potential juror pool might have a lower percentage of blacks than the county population. On other days, he said, it might have a higher percentage.
"If you're going to say we've got to be like Noah's ark and have one of this and one of that, that's hardly random," Willoughby said. "What we try to do is bring in a cross-section of the community, and I don't think on any given day the jury pool is going to mirror the community."
