Ethnicity and the Jury System

Discrimination in the jury system has been a matter of constitutional and ethical concern at least since the mid-nineteenth century. Ethnic and linguistic minorities have been disadvantaged by the use of the peremptory challenge, statutory requirements, and administrative practices which compromised the Sixth Amendment provision for a jury of one's peers with its implication for juror impartiality. Attacks on the discriminatory applications of those systems and practices resulted in reduction, as gradual as it was, of the exclusionary practices. Batson vs Kentucky made the Sixth Amendment guarantee more reachable for ethnic and linguistic minorities.