•  
  •  
 

Abstract

Peremptory strikes, and criticism of the permissive constitutional framework regulating them, have dominated the scholarship on race and the jury for the past several decades. But we have overlooked another important way in which the American jury reflects and reproduces racial hierarchies: massive racial disparities also pervade the use of challenges for cause. This Article examines challenges for cause and race in nearly 400 trials and, based on original archival research, presents a revisionist account of the Supreme Court’s three most recent Batson cases. It establishes that challenges for cause, no less than peremptory strikes, are an important—and unrecognized—vehicle of racial exclusion in criminal adjudication.

Challenges for cause are racially skewed, in part, because the Supreme Court has insulated the challenge-for-cause process from meaningful review. Scholars frequently write that jury selection was “constitutionalized” in the 1970s and 1980s, but this doctrinal account is incomplete. In the interstices of the Court’s fair-cross-section, equal protection, and due process jurisprudence, there is a “missing” law of challenges for cause. By overlooking challenges for cause, scholars have failed to notice the important ways in which jury selection remains free from constitutional regulation.

Challenges for cause as they exist today—effectively standardless, insulated from meaningful review, and racially skewed—do more harm than good. They hinder, more than help, the jury in its central roles: (1) protecting the individual against governmental overreach; (2) allowing the community a democratic voice in articulating public values; (3) finding facts; (4) bolstering the perceived legitimacy and fairness of criminal verdicts; and (5) educating jurors as citizens. We need to rethink who is qualified to serve as a juror and how we select them.

Share

COinS