A federal appeals court said the way the federal trial court in Manhattan identifies prospective jurors was prone to "troubling" racial disparities but that a defendant failed to prove it caused the systematic underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic or Latino people as jurors, Reuters reports. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Black man's 2023 gun-offense conviction, rejecting his arguments that the grand jury that indicted him was not drawn from a fair cross-section of the community. Defendant Ellva Slaughter cited data he said showed that the federal court's jury selection procedures systematically under-represents Black and Hispanic or Latino people. His lawyers argued that while Black people comprise 21.19% of the jury eligible population in the court's district, only 16.08% of potential jurors were Black. Hispanic or Latino people comprised 28.44% of relevant voters, yet only 19.41% of the jury population.
Slaughter's lawyers from the Federal Defenders of New York argued that his rights under the Constitution's Sixth Amendment and the Jury Selection and Service Act of 1968 were violated. Circuit Judge Beth Robinson said in Thursday's opinion for a three-judge panel that the disparities are "troubling," particularly as they have worsened over the last three decades. She said the New York trial court was the lone district of the six in the 2nd Circuit's solely to use voter registration data to identify potential jurors and not supplement its list with names from other sources. When Slaughter was indicted, the court updated the list of potential jurors only every four years, though as of October 2023 it does so every two years. Robinson said "there may come a time where persistent disparities, sufficiently proven to be caused by the district’s jury selection process, can no longer be tolerated." She said in Slaughter's case, his lawyers lacked sufficient data to back up their claims that the district's practices caused Black and Hispanic or Latino people to be systematically excluded.
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