When 566 Baton Rouge residents were called up for jury duty last week in a capital murder trial, defense attorneys were quick to spot a racial imbalance.

Jury pools in East Baton Rouge Parish typically skew white, according to six years of trial data compiled by The Advocate. And the group that was drawn for the trial of Grover Cannon, a black man accused of killing a white Shreveport police officer, was no different.

In a parish where 46 percent of the population is black, the pool of prospective jurors for Cannon’s trial was just 34 percent black. That’s enough of a racial disparity on its own to render the jury pool for Cannon’s trial unconstitutional, his attorneys argue.

But as his defense team scanned the faces in the courtroom and the list of potential jurors, a more surprising deviation stood out.

The same group of potential jurors was devoid of youth — no matter the color.

Juror eligibility starts at age 18, but not a single person in the group of 566 men and women was under 26, said Kerry Cuccia, director of the Capital Defense Project of Southeast Louisiana.

It was no fluke, defense advocates say.

A review of jury data from 2017 and the first half of 2018 showed that none of the 65,000 people who were sent jury summonses in East Baton Rouge Parish during that time was born after June 1993, said Jim Craig, director of the MacArthur Justice Center. The advocacy group received the data from the court through a subpoena in a different case.

Craig provided The Advocate with that data, along with jury lists from the 19th Judicial District for 2016 and 2014. Those lists also show that the youngest person on the roster of eligible jurors was born in June 1993.

“The Constitution and Louisiana law require that all eligible citizens have an opportunity to be selected for jury service,” Craig said. “Any system that automatically excludes citizens in a particular group, or that causes under-representation of a group of citizens, violates both those citizens’ rights and the rights of the parties to the case.”

Ann McCrory, the court's judicial administrator, said Tuesday that she was just learning of the allegation that young people had been left off juries for years. She said she could not say whether it was true, and she did not know how such an error could have occurred.

“The only way I knew about this was that you contacted me,” McCrory said. “I’m kind of baffled by that.”

Cannon is accused of murder in the killing of Thomas LaValley in 2015 as the 29-year-old Shreveport Police Department officer responded to a domestic call. Because of its high profile, the case was moved to Baton Rouge, but only for jury selection, which was ongoing Tuesday. The chosen jurors will head to Shreveport for the trial.

Cannon's attorneys speculate that the absence of young people in the jury pool is the result of a computer programming error. A master list — taken from driving and voter records — is culled to get rid of duplicate names. Cannon’s attorneys say the system “filtered out citizens by birthdate, eliminating those under the age of 18. However, this filter appears to never have been update(ed).”

But McCrory said the person who cleans up the lists from the Office of Motor Vehicles and the Secretary of State's Office told her he “doesn’t look at the age. He doesn’t care about the age, and there is no birthdate he puts in to filter out people under the age of 18.”

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If the defense lawyers are right, roughly 14,000 eligible young residents are left off East Baton Rouge Parish jury rolls.

The discovery has the potential to spark legal challenges by defendants who were convicted by juries plucked from an incomplete roster of potential jurors. Juries convicted 201 felony defendants in the 19th Judicial District over the six-year period ending in 2016.

But Peter Joy, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who has written about race and jury selection, said it’s doubtful that an inadvertent mistake that left young people off juror rolls would result in a conviction being overturned.

Still, “I could see somebody who is coming up to trial now, in which the jury pool has excluded this whole group of potential jurors, where they could challenge and say, ‘Now that you know this is a problem, you have to fix it,' ” Joy said.

The shortage of black representation that Cannon's attorneys found in juror data from 2017 and 2018 is less surprising, though perhaps no less problematic. It mirrors the findings of an extensive Advocate review of trial records from 2011 to 2016.

Over those six years, the average jury pool in the 19th Judicial District was 32 percent black, compared to a parish population that is now 46 percent black. The more recent data from 2017 and 2018 also show jury venires in the parish were 32 percent black. The group summoned for Cannon’s trial is 34 percent black, his attorneys said.

Most of the drop-off in black representation comes on the front end, in a failure to locate prospective jurors due to incorrect addresses, Cannon’s attorneys claim. They argue that today’s jury pools in East Baton Rouge Parish more closely resemble the racial mix in the parish from two decades ago, and that the court is violating the constitution by failing to draw from a representative cross-section of the community.

Louisiana courts have overturned convictions before when jury commissioners have removed specific segments of the population from the rolls of potential jurors.

In 1984, the Louisiana Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a man who was tried before a jury in Evangeline Parish, where commissioners removed anyone over the age of 70 from the list of eligible jurors.

State law exempts people over 70 from jury service, but they can waive the exemption and choose to serve as jurors anyway. The court ruled that Evangeline Parish violated the law by stripping them of that option.

So far, the discovery in Cannon’s case has yet to stall his trial. Caddo Parish District Judge Ramona Emanuel last week denied motions by Cannon’s attorneys to throw out the jury pool due to its racial makeup and its dearth of young people.

Emanuel found that Cannon’s attorneys took too long to raise the issue of jurors being excluded based on their age. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal on Tuesday denied writs filed by Cannon's attorneys, who appealed Tuesday afternoon to the Louisiana Supreme Court.

“It’s unconscionable,” Craig said. “How can you possibly exclude those people, and be told you’re excluding them, and say it’s too late?”

Cannon faces the death penalty if convicted.