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Civil Rights and Discrimination
Death penalty; voir dire; peremptory strikes; race; fair trial; civil rights; constitutional law; criminal law and procedure; race and ethnicity
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Essay: Injustice In Black And White: Eliminating Prosecutors’ Peremptory Strikes In Interracial Death Penalty Cases, Daniel Hatoum
Essay: Injustice In Black And White: Eliminating Prosecutors’ Peremptory Strikes In Interracial Death Penalty Cases, Daniel Hatoum
Brooklyn Law Review
This essay advocates that prosecutors’ peremptory strikes should be eliminated in interracial capital cases. The application of the death penalty has a race problem, especially for interracial cases. A conviction is far more likely if the defendant is black and the victim is white. This is due to the fact that in interracial cases, prosecutors utilize peremptory strikes to prevent black jurors from serving on cases in which the defendant is black and the victim is white. This essay is the first to argue that such a system stacks the deck against defendants in interracial capital cases in an unconstitutional …