WOW, OK...so I am doing English grammatical exercises on Exercise Central for AP Style and I'm trying to figure out where to place commas in each sentence only to realize that this grammatical exercise is actually teaching me about the process of selecting a jury. It says that when a case is taking place, dealing with a capital crime, the judge and lawyers can screen out potential jurors who are opposed to the death penalty. I kind of knew this because I remember my grandmother telling me that when you are called to jury duty, they ask you a series of questions. They generally don't like if you are particularly biased about anything such as religion, death penalty etc. They may prefer to select a non-opinionated, non-religious person, because I guess to them this means that the trail will be more fair?!
So the exercise goes on to say that minorities and women are two groups who are generally more in opposition to the death penalty and are therefore inevitably excluded from being on the jury...and they look up and their jury "contains a disproportionate amount of white men." Isn't that something? So much for trying to prevent bias...LOL
The Supreme Court has deemed that it is of course illegal to discriminate against jurors on the basis of race, but THEY CAN death-quality their jurors, which means they can choose to exclude people who are against the death penalty which inevitably "eliminates many of people of color from the jury pool." "However, some legal experts are concerned that death-qualifying a jury, can lead to wrongfully convictions, which in turn means the execution of innocent people."And haven't we seen this many of time in our legal system? Hhhmmm. There's my legal lesson for the day...yeah, grammatical and legal lessons all wrapped into one!
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