Friedman Kaplan Files Amicus Brief in Jury Selection Discrimination Case
Friedman Kaplan recently filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at the University of California, Irvine School of Law and the New England Innocence Project in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in Commonwealth v. Robinson. The brief advocates for the enforcement, and reiterates the importance, of safeguards against racial discrimination and bias in the jury selection process.
The brief was filed in response to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s solicitation of amicus briefing on the issue of whether the trial judge erred by allowing the prosecutor to exercise a peremptory strike against a prospective Black juror, purportedly based on his occupation as an engineer, only after the court invited the prosecutor to also strike a white engineer whom the prosecutor had not intended to challenge. The brief contends that the prosecutor’s strike of the Black juror violated well-established constitutional precedents applying the U.S. Constitution and the Massachusetts Constitution, both of which prohibit the use of peremptory challenges to exclude prospective jurors from jury service on the basis of race and other protected characteristics.
The brief further posits that the trial judge committed reversible error and otherwise undermined existing protections against discrimination in jury selection by allowing the prosecutor effectively to “moot” the constitutional violation that arose from the prosecutor’s strike of the Black juror by belatedly and reluctantly striking the white juror; instead, the trial court should have simply rejected outright the prosecutor’s discriminatory and impermissible strike of the Black juror.
Finally, in light of practical challenges that Massachusetts trial courts have faced in seeking to effectuate the schema crafted by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to protect against discrimination in jury selection, the brief encourages the Court to consider an alternative approach, termed the “Objective Observer” standard adopted by several other states. The proposed standard requires a trial court to consider whether an objective observer could view race or ethnicity as a factor in a prosecutor’s exercise of a peremptory challenge of a prospective juror.
The Friedman Kaplan team included litigation associates Dania Bardavid and Jason Koffler under the supervision of partner Stan Chiueh.