When Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty was in her tenure as a public defender she noticed a disturbing trend.
According to the now top prosecutor in the county, time after time, many of her defendants, often Black, were facing almost all white juries.
“I had one case where a client (who was Black) was offered a (plea) deal that he declined, but when he saw the jury he asked, ‘Is that deal still available,'” said Moriarty in an interview with MinnPost following the vacated sentence of Marvin Haynes, convicted in 2005 for the murder of a Minneapolis flower shop owner.
The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the accused an impartial jury of their peers. But data from the Minnesota court system showing racial disparities in the selection of jurors for trials across the metro area over the past 10 years has put that guarantee in doubt.
In response to increasing concerns about a lack of representation in jury makeups, public defenders and criminal defense attorneys across the state have filed demands for representative juries, though solutions to the issue remain far from concrete.
Disparities in jury makeups and defendants across the metro
According to data obtained from the state court system, white residents of Hennepin County – which includes Minneapolis and is the most populous county in the state – were more likely to be selected to take part in a jury trial when compared to their share of the county’s population. White residents made up between 82% and 84% of all juries for trials between 2013 and 2022, though they make up about 73% of the county’s population.
The opposite was true for the county’s Black residents. Despite making up more than 14% of the county’s population, Black residents made up only 7% to 8% of juries between 2013 and 2019. That number declined even further in recent years, dipping to 6% in 2020 and again to just 5% in 2021.
Every other racial demographic group in Hennepin County, including Asian and Native American residents, were also underrepresented in juries over that 10-year period.
Similar patterns existed in Ramsey County, the next most populous county in Minnesota. White residents make up about 65% of the county’s population, but 75% of the jurors selected for trials in 2022. Every other racial demographic group was underrepresented compared to their population, as was the case in Hennepin, but some groups saw changes to that figure over time.
The amount Black residents in the county who were selected to be on a jury has remained stagnant since 2013, hovering around 6%, compared to a population of more than 13% countywide. But Asian residents – who make up a substantial portion of the county’s population at almost 16% – saw gains in representation on juries, going from just under 7% in 2013 to more than 11% in 2022.
Despite being underrepresented on juries, Black residents of Minnesota’s two largest counties were overrepresented as defendants.
According to data from the state court system showing the racial breakdown of of defendants in adult criminal cases with a jury trial hearing held between 2013 and 2023, Black individual in Hennepin County made up more than half of all defendants each year, hovering between 53% and 61% during that time frame, except for a spike to 64% in 2020 and a dip to 49% in 2022. That is around four times their share of the county’s population, while white defendants were between 14% and 23% during the same period.
In Ramsey County, during the same time frame, Black individuals accounted for between 39% and 53% of all defendants, excluding a spike to 64% in 2021. The number of white individuals that were defendants was similar to Black residents early in the decade, with 37% in 2013 and 38% in 2014, but saw a gradual decline over the decade to 21% in 2022 and just 18% in 2023.
The five remaining counties that make up the Twin Cities metro area – Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Scott and Washington – all exhibited the same disparities, though at a smaller scale due to smaller populations.
Finding the cause
The way the jury system is organized is the state court system contracts with a company called Jury Systems Incorporated, which compiles various source lists that include registered voter rolls from the Secretary of State’s office, and drivers licenses and state IDs from the Department of Motor Vehicles. The company then cross-references with death records and mailing lists from the U.S. Postal Service to create a composite list, which is then divided into the various judicial districts and distributed to local jury offices.
From there, the local jury office does the math on how many jurors will be needed for a given week of trials, randomly selects a certain number of prospective jurors and sends out summonses in the mail, sending out extra in anticipation of non-responses. That results in a pool of about 250 people, of which 25-30 people are then randomly selected for each trial.
“The lack of representativeness occurs before they even get there on Monday for the most part,” said Emmett Donnelly, a Hennepin County public defender with a 35-year career.
When the 25 to 30 prospective jurors show up to fill the spots on the jury – six for a misdemeanor trial and 12 for a felony trial, plus an alternate or two, respectively – attorneys receive information on each of them beforehand that includes race, gender, age and occupation, and both sides question the candidates. The prosecution gets three strikes to use to dismiss juror candidates while the defense gets five, though strikes for cause – like a conflict of interest – are unlimited.
Criminal defense attorney Mohammed El-Bashir said that in his experience, it’s very unlikely that race plays enough of a role in the paneling process. The strategy for attorneys changes with each case, depending heavily on the types of charges.
Due to the lack of information provided ahead of time via the juror profiles, attorneys may make broad generalizations based on what might benefit their client. For example, in a self-defense case, the defense may want to panel a man with a family who may see himself in that kind of situation, or prosecutors may want to panel more women if they’re trying a sexual assault case.
“You're kind of picking like six or seven different judges for your person,” El-Bashir said. “You just want an idea of whether this person is going to be receptive to my arguments or not.”
But, he said, using strikes based on race is unheard of for either the prosecution or the defense.
“At the end of the day, it's very frowned upon,” El-Bashir said. “I would be really surprised if there's prosecutors purely striking people based off of that.”
Future and solutions
Hundreds of filings from public defenders and criminal defense attorneys demanding more representation on juries were heard in December 2022. A month later, Hennepin County District Judge John Lucas issued an order that was a call to action for the court system at large to find a remedy to the issue.
Donnelly is among the attorneys leading the way on litigating on the issue trying to help improve the way the system works. One main fix that Donnelly said he sees is to update how the pools of prospective jurors are assembled. The problem with using voter rolls and lists from the DMV is that they’re both lists that aren’t updated very often, he said.
“How often is your address updated when you register in the voter rolls? Only time will be is if you actually go to vote,” Donnelly said. “And with driver’s licenses, if you change addresses you're supposed to notify them but how many people do, and who would be the class of people that would be more likely to do that and have the ability to do that?”
The solution? Adding state tax return data to the list used to assemble potential jurors. Donnelly said this would fix issues with how current the list is because everyone is required to file a tax return every year and each time someone files they provide a current address.
Another is to improve juror compensation, which has remained at $20 per day, but for many, most of that is spent on parking alone.
Donnelly said the biggest immediate effect of these disparities is on the jurors themselves, and their feelings of whether they were able to honestly and objectively judge a case without an array of voices in the deliberation room. The other effect, he said, is on the public.
“When (people) look at an all-white jury convicting a Black person or a nonwhite person, people tend to scratch your head and question the legitimacy of that,” he said.
Mohamed Ibrahim
Mohamed Ibrahim is MinnPost’s environment and public safety reporter. He can be reached at mibrahim@minnpost.com.
