The judge in the Ahmaud Arbery case said there appeared to be ‘intentional discrimination’ in jury selection. Here’s why the trial moved forward anyway
A nearly all-white jury will decide the fate of three white men accused of chasing down and killing Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man whose family says he was just out for a jog, in February 2020.
A pool of potential jurors is whittled down to a final jury through a process called voir dire, where jurors are questioned on matters relevant to the case and either eliminated “for cause” or with a “peremptory challenge,” Vanderbilt law professor Chris Slobogin and defense attorney Julius Kim explained.
A potential juror can be eliminated for cause by admitting during this process that they can’t be fair or impartial during the trial, while prosecutors and defense attorneys can use a peremptory challenge to eliminate a potential juror without stating a reason, the experts said.
After a long selection process which lasted two-and-a-half weeks and ended Wednesday, a single Black man made it onto the jury in a Georgia county where about a quarter of the population is Black or African American.
Prosecutors complained that 11 Black potential jurors had been eliminated because of their race, and even Judge Timothy Walmsley said in court that there seemed to be evidence of “intentional discrimination.” But the case went forward anyway on Friday with opening statements.
Insider spoke to legal experts who said that the defense had a significant advantage in the jury selection process, and explained why the judge proceeded with the case after expressing reservations.
Slobogin gave the examples of two Black women who were dismissed from the jury, one for saying “the whole case is about racism” and the other for saying she thought Arbery’s killing “was wrong.”
“Neither of those explanations would probably be enough to remove those jurors for cause, but they are enough to remove them under Batson,” he explained.
Still, the racial make-up of the jury “doesn’t look good” from an outside perspective, Slobogin said, while Kim said it makes him “nervous” that so few minorities are on the jury.
