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- When you serve on a jury,
you are serving in an institution
that is older than the United States of America,
it is older than democracy itself.
By participating in this function,
you are part of that long line of jurors
who for centuries before
have played this absolutely critical role
of sitting in judgment of their peers
and delivering an honest and just verdict.
The jury that we have was really created
in medieval England, so it's been over 800 years
of being an essential part of English common law.
Though in colonial America,
juries would have looked similar in some ways today
in the sense that they were 12 people,
they would've all been men,
they would've been for the most part middle-class people.
Typically, a criminal trial lasted maybe 10 to 15 minutes.
And to make sure that they resolved it quickly,
the jurors were ordered to have no meat, drink,
fire, or candle,
because nobody ate until they were all unanimous.
- Increasingly, juries are a kind of check
on the lawyer class and on the judges.
They're really intended to keep the judges honest,
to prevent bribes,
to make sure that the judicial system is transparent.
The British parliament, in 1774,
passes a series of laws known as the Intolerable Acts.
These acts in part limited the power of juries,
and restricted what juries could do,
and who could serve on juries.
That was really one of the sparks
that led to the American Revolution,
to establish a right to jury trials.
- In the US Constitution, we have Article Three,
which guarantees a right of jury trial in criminal cases.
It's one of the few rights
that is actually in our Constitution,
not in the Bill of Rights, which is added later.
The Bill of Rights confirms it
in the Sixth Amendment,
guaranteeing juries in criminal cases,
the Seventh Amendment guaranteeing juries
in some civil cases.
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- John Adams famously said
that the right to representative government
and to a jury trial were the heart and lungs of liberty.
One of the problems was that this did not apply
to African-Americans who were enslaved.
The Supreme Court in the Dred Scott Case in 1857
decided that not just enslaved African-Americans,
but any African-American who was descended from slaves
was not and could not be a citizen of the United States.
The Civil War really could be seen as a struggle
to overturn the court's decision in Dred Scott.
Because they were not citizens,
they couldn't serve on juries, they couldn't testify either,
they couldn't be parties in cases before the court.
- After the Civil War and after Emancipation,
people who had been enslaved
were now potentially eligible for jury service,
and this was a huge thing
in terms of expanding participation in our jury system.
You can imagine massive resistance
in many of the former Confederate states
to this type of jury service.
And so, various techniques were used
to try to exclude African-Americans from jury service.
- For many, many years,
the jurors were all white and had to own land.
In the late 1800s, the Supreme Court said
a West Virginia statute saying jurors had to be all white
was unconstitutional.
- The Supreme Court's decision in the Strauder case
was an important advancement
in the right of African-Americans to serve on juries.
Strauder was an African-American who was convicted of murder
by the courts in West Virginia,
by a jury that was made up entirely of white people.
Strauder challenged this,
and the case went up before the Supreme Court.
- The Supreme Court held
that you could not be excluded from a jury
on the basis of your race.
And so therefore, explicitly racist jury policies
were unconstitutional,
but many places found techniques that they could use
to nonetheless restrict jury service.
- If we look at our democracy,
the right to vote and the right to serve on a jury
are really the two important cornerstones of it,
and we also see how they're connected to each other.
For many years, people were chosen from voting lists
as to whether or not they'd be eligible to serve on a jury.
And so if in the voting list,
we excluded people on the basis of race,
either directly in our early years
or indirectly in the form of poll tax or literacy tests,
that meant we really were also excluding people
on the basis of race from serving on our juries.
We look at the Jim Crow laws
that really put up more obstacles and hurdles
in terms of separating races
and not allowing them to serve
in certain parts of our democracy.
- [Carlton F.W. Larson] One of the big improvements
came with the Voting Rights Act of 1965
because in many jurisdictions
how you become a juror is to be on the voting roles.
- Open your polling places to all your people.
Allow men and women to register and vote,
whatever the color of their skin.
- By expanding the voter rules,
it then expanded the pool of people
who are eligible for jury service,
and it eliminated one of the techniques
that had kept so many juries as an all-white institution.
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So the first territory to allow women to serve as jurors
was Wyoming in 1870.
It was a frontier territory.
It had very few women, it wanted to attract women,
and one of the ways it could do that
was by offering up voting and jury service.
And then it took essentially 100 years
for the rest of the United States to come on board.
- Initially, the Equal Protection Clause
was really seen as applying to men and not to women.
It really isn't until the 20th century
that we have a series of decisions by the Supreme Court
in which the Equal Protection Clause is applied
to gender as well as to race.
- [Allen R. Derr] In other words,
what I'm saying is I think women are every bit as entitled
to protection of the 14th Amendment.
They are persons.
- [Joel Richard Paul] Those cases struck down bans
on women from serving as jurors
and allowed women to participate in jury pools.
- [Ruth Bader Ginsburg] Facts like race
is a visible, immutable characteristic,
bearing no necessary relationship to ability.
- Even if women had a formal right to serve on the jury,
sometimes it didn't in practice work out that way.
And in many cases,
the attorney simply used peremptory strikes
to eliminate women from the jury pool.
And these are the strikes that an attorney can use
to simply excuse a jury.
They don't have to give a reason,
they don't have to explain it to the judge.
They simply say,
"We would like this juror not to be part of the jury."
So it's really not until probably the 1960s and 1970s
that we get juries and jury pools
that consistently reflect, you know,
the gender diversity of our country.
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- The courts have often stepped in to examine the way
in which lawyers use their peremptory challenges,
the way in which they may be excusing jurors
not for cause
but on the basis of whatever reason they choose.
And in 1965, a case went to the Supreme Court
called Swain versus Alabama.
And in that case, an African-American man
was charged with rape of a white woman in Alabama.
The prosecutor had used his peremptory challenges
to strike all of the African-American jurors
or potential jurors from sitting on that jury,
leaving it with an all-white jury to decide the case.
The defense argued this is unconstitutional,
it's a violation of equal protection.
- [Constance Baker Motley] Any state prosecutor
who uses his peremptory challenges to affect this result,
the exclusion of a whole racial group,
violates the Equal Protection Clause.
- The Supreme Court found
that there was nothing impermissible
about the way the lawyer used his challenges.
It only took the courts here in California about 10 years
to correct that injustice.
And in 1978, in a case called Wheeler versus California,
the California Supreme Court looked and examined the issue
of a prosecutor who used these peremptory challenges
to strike all the African-American potential jurors
from the jury pool,
leaving an all-white to try and decide the case.
The California Supreme Court found
that that was impermissible
and unconstitutional under California law.
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The California Legislature has acted
in a couple of very dramatic and important ways
to help our juries be more diverse.
So in 2019, a bill was passed by the California Legislature
that gave persons
who have previously been convicted of felonies,
not all of them, but many and most of them,
the right to vote and the right to serve on juries.
In 2020, the California Legislature
passed two very important bills
that deal with racial justice and criminal justice
in the state of California.
The first bill dealt directly with jury selection,
that prohibited the use of peremptory challenges
on the basis of a broad array of issues,
not just on the basis of race, but on the basis of gender,
gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality.
- I'm also grateful for the fact
that we're also addressing the issue too this time
of jury selection.
So we're talking about really addressing the issues
of justice and fairness in this country.
- Also in 2020, the Legislature passed
what's called the Racial Justice Act.
And the goal of the Racial Justice Act
is not only to make the system and the outcomes more fair,
but to make it more inclusive.
Serving on a jury is one of the most important things
that a member of a community can do.
It not only ensures us that the outcome will be fair,
but it helps give confidence in the outcome
to people in our community
who look at what happens in the courts.
Also historically, the jurors can serve as a barrier
and as a safety provision
for people who are charged with crimes and criminal cases.
It's really the jurors who sit between the state
in the form of prosecutor,
and a person accused by the state
in the form of the defendant,
to be able to make sure the government acted fairly,
acted properly, and acted without improper motive.
And finally, it is the jury that really brings
that little piece of compassion, sometimes mercy,
into the courtroom.
We can see why it's so important not just to have a jury,
but to have a jury that's made up of people
from all parts of our community,
so that they all bring their perspective,
their life experiences, their understanding,
into the courtroom.
And it's through that shared knowledge
and that shared exchange
that we hope we can have some outcome that's fair.
That is how our system will work better
and will help us move towards a more perfect justice system.
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