In a new report, “Fatal Flaws: Revealing the Racial and Religious Gerrymandering of the Capital Jury,” the American Civil Liberties Union examines how the requirement that jurors be willing to impose a death sentence to serve on a capital case “disproportionately excludes Black prospective jurors, women, and people of faith from serving in some of the most important cases heard in American courthouses.”
The exclusion violates the Constitutional guarantee “that every person accused of a crime has the right to be tried by a jury of their peers, but that promise is by definition denied for people facing the death penalty,” according to the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project Deputy Director Brian Stull.
As a result, “Death-qualified juries act differently than those that are not. They are more likely to convict, to ignore evidence favoring life over death, to be influenced by racial bias, and to deliberate less thoroughly,” according to the report.