Jury Failure

I always get a kick watching people miss the point of the problem.

The latest case is this Supreme Court case where the SCOTUS overturned a 29 year-old conviction of a death row inmate. Here's the story from CNN:

Timothy Tyrone Foster, an African-American, is on death row in Georgia for the 1987 murder of an elderly white woman, Queen Madge White. The jury that convicted him was all white. Twenty years after his sentence his attorneys obtained notes the prosecution team took while it was engaged in picking a jury, including marking potential jurors who were black had a "b" written by their name. 

"The focus on race in the prosecution's file plainly demonstrates a concerted effort to keep black prospective jurors off the jury," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas was the only dissenter. 

The 7-1 decision comes as a welcome relief to critics who say racial discrimination in jury selection persists across the country some 30 years after the Supreme Court ruled potential jurors cannot be struck because of race.

Naturally, everyone is playing "lynch the black guy" for not being politically correct. While I disagree with Thomas's opinion, I also disagree with the majority opinion too.

The problem is the jury selection system. This is an absurd waste of time and taxpayer money so lawyers can stack juries in their own favor, as they did here. Only judges should be allowed to exempt jurors, not lawyers, and they should only be exempted because they cannot be impartial, or they cannot serve for good reasons. We all know the game the lawyers are playing, and it needs to end.

Given the choice, I would either have professional jurors, or just require people on unemployment to serve. But if we are going to be pulling voters in to do it, at least quit wasting their time with this legal game of jury-rigging.