Rev. William Barber: Stop excluding Black people in NC from death penalty juries
One of the chief authors of North Carolina’s modern constitution and therefore its court system was J.W. Hood, a Black man and AME Zion pastor who spent the first decades of his life fighting for the abolition of slavery. Today, he’s exactly the kind of person who’s most likely to be denied the right to serve on a jury.
A century and a half after Hood spoke of the importance of jury service, a Wake County death penalty case is exposing the reality that Black people’s right to be represented in the jury box is still under threat in North Carolina. Brandon Xavier Hill, a capital defendant, is challenging the process of “death qualification.”
Under the current rules, a citizen can be excluded from serving on a capital jury if a prosecutor can demonstrate either their opposition to the death penalty or their distrust of law enforcement.
According to a Michigan State University study, these rules have excluded African-Americans from serving on Wake County juries at nearly three times the rate of their neighbors. Nationwide, studies show that Black people are more likely to oppose the death penalty and question evidence presented by law enforcement.
As Rev. Hood knew well, this perspective is the result of the African-American experience in the United States, which is shaped by the racist history of policing and the death penalty. Rules that do not recognize this fact make it impossible for us to work together toward a multiracial democracy.
Even those who disagree with us on the prevalence of race discrimination in courtrooms likely agree that persecution based on religion should be unacceptable. However, the process of death qualification might exclude Hood not only because he was a Black man who understood the pernicious effect of racism, but also because he was a serious Christian.
Followers of Jesus, who was falsely convicted and executed under Roman law, have often opposed state-sanctioned killing. As Christian ministers in the Baptist and Christian church (Disciples of Christ) traditions, we could not serve on a jury under current rules.
This is not only a violation of the rights of the accused, but also of citizens who understand, as Hood did, that our country cannot be a functioning democracy if we regularly exclude large cohorts of our neighbors from the ballot and jury box.
As president of the first Freedmen’s Convention after the Civil War, Hood stood in the pulpit of Raleigh’s St. Paul’s AME Church and said that if Black people were to be full citizens of North Carolina, they needed three basic rights: to serve in the jury box, to testify in court, and to vote.
North Carolina’s Republican leaders gained national attention for their determination to curtail voting rights, especially for African Americans, often under the guise of “election integrity.” One NAACP lawsuit prompted a federal judge to find that N.C. lawmakers had targeted Black voters with “almost surgical precision.” Now, Republican legislators are using a legal theory championed by John Eastman, who tried to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election, to argue that courts don’t have a right to serve their basic function of judicial review concerning elections.
We will continue to fight these attacks on voting rights. Just as importantly, we’ll also work to expose the lesser-known tricks and tactics, like death qualification, that disproportionately exclude African Americans and others from serving on juries.