Why a landmark Supreme Court ruling has failed to keep racial bias out of jury selection

The execution of James Broadnax in Texas on April 30, 2026, serves as a stark illustration of the ongoing failure of the United States legal system to eliminate racial bias from jury selection. Broadnax, a Black man sentenced to death for a 2008 robbery and murder of two men, was executed on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Batson v. Kentucky, a landmark decision intended to bar prosecutors from excluding jurors solely based on their race.

During the jury selection process for Broadnax’s trial, the prosecutor moved to dismiss all seven Black individuals in the jury pool. Court documents cited by CNN revealed that the prosecutor used a spreadsheet that bolded only the names of Black jurors, while leaving white and Latino names unbolded. Following objections from the defense, the judge reseated one Black juror to avoid an entirely white jury. The trial ultimately proceeded with 11 white jurors and one Black juror.

The Impact of Jury Composition

The racial makeup of a jury can significantly influence the outcome of a trial. James Coleman, a law professor at Duke University, states that juries containing two or more members of color tend to deliberate longer, consider a broader range of evidence, and are collectively more accurate in their statements about cases, regardless of the defendant’s race.

A 2012 Duke University study focusing on two Florida counties provided quantitative evidence of this disparity. The research found that juries formed from all-white jury pools convicted Black defendants 16% more often than white defendants. This gap was nearly eliminated when at least one Black member was included in the jury pool.

A History of Exclusion

The exclusion of Black citizens from jury service is a systemic issue dating back to the founding of the United States. Before the Civil War, eligibility was often tied to voting rights, and some states explicitly restricted jury service to white citizens. For example, a Tennessee law from 1858 stated that only white male citizens who were freeholders or householders and at least 21 years old were qualified to serve as grand or petit jurors.

Although the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments theoretically granted Black people the right to serve on juries nationwide after the Civil War, many states continued to resist. West Virginia law once specified that only white male citizens aged 21 and older were liable for jury service.

In 1880, the Supreme Court struck down the West Virginia law in a case involving a former slave who had been sentenced to death by an all-white jury. The court ruled that the law violated the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law, stating that denying colored citizens the right to participate in the administration of the law as jurors was effectively a brand upon them and a forbidden discrimination.

Despite this ruling, exclusion persisted through the use of subjective eligibility standards. Legal scholar Sarah Claxton argued in 2022 that states implemented vague requirements—such as “good moral character” or “educational qualifications”—that were applied discriminatorially to keep Black citizens off juries.

The Evolution of Legal Challenges

The legal battle against racial discrimination in jury selection saw a setback in 1965 with Swain v. Alabama. In that case, the Supreme Court held that a defendant in a criminal case is not constitutionally entitled to a proportionate number of their race on the trial jury or the jury panel.

It took two more decades for the court to address the issue again. In the April 30, 1986, decision of Batson v. Kentucky, the court considered a case where a prosecutor used peremptory challenges to strike all four Black persons in the jury pool. The court reaffirmed that a State denies a Black defendant equal protection when it puts him on trial before a jury from which members of his race have been purposefully excluded.

The Batson ruling established a three-step process for challenging jury selection: first, the defendant must provide evidence suggesting racial discrimination in the prosecutor’s strikes; second, the prosecutor must offer a neutral explanation for the exclusion; and third, the trial judge determines if the stated reason is genuine.

The Failure of the Batson Standard

Critics argue that the Batson test is easily bypassed because trial judges often accept any non-racial explanation provided by the prosecutor, regardless of how thin the justification may be. Justice Thurgood Marshall warned at the time of the 1986 decision that the ruling would not end discrimination, predicting that prosecutors could easily assert facially neutral reasons that trial courts would be ill-equipped to second-guess.

In the case of James Broadnax, prosecutors claimed the Black jurors were dismissed because they could not be impartial or had reservations about the death penalty. According to a 2025 report from the Death Penalty Information Center, prosecutors learned to successfully defend race-based challenges using “flimsiest excuses,” meaning defendants rarely win Batson challenges despite evidence of bias.

The statistical data reflects a lack of meaningful enforcement:

• The Death Penalty Information Center has identified only 68 cases across 16 states since 1986 in which a capital defendant successfully had a conviction or death sentence reversed due to racial discrimination in jury selection.
• A 2020 Berkeley Law report found that the California Supreme Court reviewed 142 Batson claims over 30 years and found violations in only three cases. At the time of the report, it had been over three decades since the court found a violation involving the strike of a Black prospective juror.
• A 2025 analysis by the Equal Justice Initiative of 122 capital cases in Alabama found that more than one-third were decided by juries with no Black jurors or only one.

Elisabeth Semel, a UC Berkeley law professor and co-director of the school’s Death Penalty Clinic, has given the Batson ruling a grade of “F,” stating in an interview with the Death Penalty Information Center that the decision has failed to achieve its promise.