I'm not the only person who has strong memories of 12 Angry Men. The film had a major impact on Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, as detailed in this New York Times article.



Around the time that Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor was entering college, the man who would eventually become her husband took her to see a film by Sidney Lumet. It was “12 Angry Men,” from 1957, about a jury deliberating on the case of a young man accused of murder. That film turned out to be a pivotal moment in the life of Justice Sotomayor, who at the time had been considering a career in law. In particular, she was inspired by a moment in the film in which one of the jurors, a naturalized American citizen, expresses reverence for the American jury system. “It sold me that I was on the right path,” she told an audience Sunday evening at the Fordham University School of Law after a screening of the film. “This movie continued to ring the chords within me.”

... But even as much as she admired the film, Justice Sotomayor, 56, said that when she was a lower-court judge, she would sometimes refer to it to instruct jurors how not to carry out their duties. The film, she said, “is so far from reality,” including in its depiction of some jurors’ behavior. “There was an awful lot of speculation,” she said. In the film, jurors discuss the weaknesses of the defendant’s legal representation. But Justice Sotomayor went further, criticizing the unseen prosecution for bringing a weak case to trial. The job of the prosecutor is not merely to convict people, she said, but also to investigate thoroughly beforehand to ensure the defendant’s guilt. Both the defense and prosecution in the film, she said, “failed in their duties.”

In the current racial discrimination case in front of SCOTUS, Justice Sotomayor has been asking some very probing questions, drawing from her own history.

This Mother Jones article details how the nation's first Latina justice shows why diversity on the court is important:



During oral arguments on Monday morning in Foster v. Chatman, a case involving racial discrimination in jury selection, Sotomayor questioned whether a Georgia prosecutor had used a bogus pretext to bounce an African American woman from a jury. The prosecutor had claimed he excused her because the woman's cousin had been arrested on a drug charge. "There's an assumption that she has a relationship with this cousin," Sotomayor told Georgia deputy attorney general Beth Burton, who argued Georgia's case before the court. "I have cousins who I know have been arrested, but I have no idea where they're in jail. I hardly—I don't know them...Doesn't that show pretext?" Her comments demonstrate the importance of her role as the first Latina justice on the court, an institution dominated by white men from privileged backgrounds. She asked the sort of question African Americans might welcome from Clarence Thomas, the only black justice, who rarely speaks from the bench. The insights she brings from her formative years in a Bronx public housing project are particularly applicable to racially charged cases like this one.

In 1883, The United States Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights act of 1875, forbidding discrimination in hotels, trains, and other public spaces, was unconstitutional and not authorized by the 13th or 14th Amendments of the Constitution.

Since Reconstruction, when Congress outlawed racial discrimination in jury service, 18 U.S.C. § 243, and the Supreme Court condemned the restriction of jury service to whites, Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880), in response to pressure for representative juries, the antidiscrimination struggle has shifted from challenging the total exclusion of minorities from the jury rolls to confronting racial bias in the jury selection process at trial, specifically the prosecution’s use of peremptory strikes to exclude jurors of color. In Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), the Supreme Court ruled that jurors cannot be excluded on the basis of race and held that, where circumstances at trial support an inference of discrimination in the use of peremptory strikes, the prosecutor must explain why she excluded African Americans, and, if she fails to give a legitimate, nonracial reason for each strike, the trial court can conclude the prosecutor acted on the basis of race and put the struck jurors back on the jury venire. Id. at 100. In the quarter century since Batson, its inadequacy to eradicate racial discrimination in jury selection has become readily apparent. As Justice Thurgood Marshall noted, “[a]ny prosecutor can easily assert facially neutral reasons for striking a juror, and trial courts are ill equipped to second-guess those reasons.” Id. at 106. People of color not only have been illegally excluded but also denigrated and insulted with pretextual reasons intended to conceal racial bias. African Americans have been excluded because they appeared to have “low intelligence”; wore eyeglasses; were single, married, or separated; or were too old for jury service at age forty-three or too young at twenty-eight. They have been barred for having relatives who attended historically black colleges; for chewing gum; and, frequently, for living in predominantly black neighborhoods.



The long history of blacks being excluded from juries, or even being able to testify in their own defense, or testify against a white man during the enslavement period, was ended (briefly) with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 . But it only took nine years to reverse the gains brought on by Reconstruction This history is part of a major report, "Illegal Racial Discrimination in Jury Selection: A Continuing Legacy," issued by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2010. You can read the full report here

Major newspapers and media networks have been reporting on the current case, and the history. The Wall Street Journal had this article detailing how the case centers on 1987 murder trial in which prosecutors trying a black defendant struck blacks from the jury.

The Los Angeles Times wrote about the Supreme Court considering racial bias in jury selection, too.

This New York Times article is titled "How America Tolerates Racism in Jury Selection."

Al Jazeera also reported on the Supreme Court taking up racial bias in a jury selection case.

For those of you who want more in-depth legal analysis, SCOTUS Blog had this argument preview:

The process of selecting juries to try criminal cases has become, at least in high-profile cases, a science of human profiling. Both sides — prosecutors and defense lawyers — try to make educated guesses about how potential jurors may react if seated, at times using behavioral experts to improve the guessing. The final shaping of the jury depends heavily upon how each side actually weeds out the jurors it doesn’t want. On Monday, the Supreme Court will explore how a court can tell whether the weeding out was intended to unconstitutionally influence the jury’s racial make-up. That can be a major source of controversy when — as in Monday’s case, Foster v. Chatman — a black man is put on trial for the death of a white woman. For much of the twentieth century, lawyers on each side of a criminal trial could exclude potential jurors without ever having to offer a justification — a method known as the “peremptory strike.” Each side had a specific number of such “strikes” to use as it wished, for whatever reason; once a prosecutor or defense lawyer used a “strike” to remove someone from the jury pool, that strike could not be challenged. The summary “peremptory strikes” were different from another selection method: striking “for cause.” In that situation, either side could ask the judge to exclude a specific person, but it had to give a reason for doing so; the judge could accept that reason as sufficient or allow the juror to remain available. No one, of course, would expressly ask the judge to exclude someone because of his race. That might be the real reason for a challenge for cause, but some other reason would actually be offered. Since a Supreme Court decision in 1880, it has been unconstitutional to exclude a potential juror solely because of that individual’s race. Nearly three decades ago, the Court took a major step toward bringing into the open the hidden use of race to shape juries through the use of “peremptory strikes.” The reality is that, most often, complaints about the use of race in composing a jury are made by defense lawyers against prosecutors in cases in which the accused is a minority.

The Supreme Court’s answer in Batson was to allow a defendant to force the prosecution to explain a strike if it seems to be racially motivated. When making a Batson challenge, as it soon came to be called, the defense must first convince the judge that there is reason to suspect that a strike was based on race, usually by pointing out the high proportion of black jurors being targeted. Next, the prosecutor has to give a race-neutral reason for striking the juror. Then it’s up to the judge to decide whether the reason is legitimate or a pretext for a race-based strike. Justice Thurgood Marshall voted with the majority in Batson, but in a concurring opinion he warned that its procedure wouldn’t really solve the problem of race-biased jury selection: it would be too easy for prosecutors to make up race-neutral reasons for striking a juror. Marshall’s skepticism was quickly vindicated. As soon as Batson was decided, prosecutors started coming up with tactics to evade it. In a 1987 training video that became notorious when it was leaked years later, Jack McMahon, an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia, told new prosecutors, “When you do have a black jury, you question them at length. And on this little sheet that you have, mark something down that you can articulate later. . . . You may want to ask more questions of those people so it gives you more ammunition to make an articulable reason as to why you are striking them, not for race.”

This is an excerpt from the infamous Philadelphia DA training video (produced by DA Ron Castille's office) which trains rookie prosecutors on how to select a jury, and among other things, to exclude Black jurors without appearing to do so.

Back in June, The New Yorker had this piece, titled " Why Is It So Easy for Prosecutors to Strike Black Jurors ?"I went to look for the training video. Here's a clip where he instructs lawyers to "Get jurors who are unfair:"You can view the full video here

I wonder how many young assistant DAs went through his training and are still practicing it?

The issue of jury discrimination does not just affect black Americans. Ignacio Garcia documents a case that is rarely mentioned when we discuss jury discrimination in White But Not Equal: Mexican Americans, Jury Discrimination, and the Supreme Court:



Ignacio García’s "White But Not Equal" explores this historic but mostly forgotten case, which became the first to recognize discrimination against Mexican Americans. Led by three dedicated Mexican American lawyers, the case argued for recognition of Mexican Americans under the 14th Amendment as a “class apart.” Despite a distinct history and culture, Mexican Americans were considered white by law during this period, yet in reality they were subjected to prejudice and discrimination. This was reflected in Hernández’s trial, in which none of the selected jurors were Mexican American. The concept of Latino identity began to shift as the demand for inclusion in the political and judicial system began. García places the Hernández v. Texas case within a historical perspective and examines the changing Anglo-Mexican relationship. More than just a legal discussion, this book looks at the whole case from start to finish and examines all the major participants, placing the story within the larger issue of the fight for Mexican American civil rights.

No matter what the Supreme Court decides, organizations and groups seeking justice will continue to challenge discrimination in the so-called justice system.

We need to support them.