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Whatsapp A Confederate flag hung over the Caddo Parish Courthouse until 2011

In the old Confederate heartland of Louisiana, African Americans are routinely struck off juries. Now, with the aid of an Australian legal team, there are moves afoot to end the process known as 'blackstriking'. The Law Report investigates.

In Caddo Parish, the legacy of the Confederacy still hangs like a fog.

Although African Americans comprise 46 to 47 per cent of registered voters in the parish, they are relentlessly blocked from participating in their criminal justice system through jury service.

This part of north-western Louisiana was the site of the second-highest number of lynchings in America between 1877 and 1950.

For six decades, a Confederate flag flew above the parish courthouse in Shreveport.

It was eventually removed in 2011, but a striking Confederate monument still stands before the court's entrance.

Imagine, as an African American, having to pass such antiquated racial signifiers as you went to court.

Yet it seems an even more insidious form racism takes place in the courts themselves.

'Although African Americans comprise 46 to 47 per cent of registered voters in the parish, they are relentlessly blocked from participating in their criminal justice system through jury service,' says James Craig, co-director of the Roderick and Solange Justice Centre in New Orleans.

Jury duty might be something many of us try to avoid, but in a parish that ranks among the top 10 US jurisdictions in terms of the application of the death penalty, it is a question of life of death.

The practice of preventing African Americans from serving as jurors is known as 'blackstriking', and according to recently compiled data it is pervasive in Caddo Parish.

'It was clear as day that of the roughly 50-50 racial mixture of potential jurors coming into the courthouse, at the end of the day the people sitting in the jury box were nine whites and three blacks, 10 whites and two blacks, 11 whites and one black, or all white,' says Craig.

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Whatsapp The Confederate monument outside the Caddo Parrish Courthouse

In 1986, the United States Supreme Court made it unconstitutional to strike potential jurors solely on the basis of race. Despite this, 'blackstriking' remains common.

Australian non-profit Reprieve Australia supplied lawyers and volunteers to examine 300 Louisiana criminal trials and more than 8,000 jurors over a decade's worth of data.



'Hundreds of hours were spent travelling to remote rural courthouses, sifting through at times very dusty records and pulling out the information from the court files to work out who was striking who in jury service, and if we could find any patterns in terms of the prosecutors' conduct,' says Ursula Noye, a Melbourne lawyer who works with Reprieve.

What they uncovered was clear: systemic evidence of 'blackstriking'.

'We found that when prosecutors were faced with allowing an otherwise qualified African American juror onto the jury, they would strike that juror 46 per cent of the time when compared to a non-African American, who they would strike only 15 per cent of the time.

'So it's slightly over three times the rate.'

Read more: A brief history of the Confederate flag

The statistics are significant, because in Caddo Parrish the racial make-up of juries correlates with trial outcomes.

'We found that the rate of acquittal appears to increase with the number of black jurors,' says Noye. 'Not one defendant was acquitted in a trial where there were two or fewer black jurors.

'The acquittal rate in 49 trials with a number of black jurors of three or more was 12 per cent.'

When lawyer James Craig spoke to The Law Report, he had just announced a lawsuit against the Caddo Parish District Attorney's Office.

'The suit alleges that there is and has been a custom, usage and policy of the district attorney to exercise pre-emptory challenges against African American citizens because of their race in order to empanel predominantly white criminal trial juries.'

The lawsuit will rely heavily on the data collected by Reprieve Australia.

The Law Report will continue to monitor progress of the litigation.

'Blackstriking' in Louisana Listen to the full discussion on The Law Report.

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