Twenty-five years ago, Earl Jerome McGahee was charged with two counts of murder in the deaths of his ex-wife and her friend.McGahee, an African-American, was tried by an all-white jury in an Alabama county that was more than 55 percent black.

The district attorney dismissed every one of the 24 blacks who qualified to serve on the jury, including Edith Ferguson, who had worked for the Selma, Ala., Police Department for many years. The reason cited for striking Ferguson from being a juror: “low intelligence.”

Bryan Stevenson of the nonprofit group Equal Justice Initiative tells NPR’s Guy Raz that assertions about intelligence are “one of the most troubling but persistent reasons” given to dismiss potential jurors who are black. Many of those potential jurors are college graduates, Stevenson says.

Last year, McGahee was granted a new trial because of the racially discriminatory jury selection in his original case. But many defendants are not so lucky.

Study Documents ‘Widespread Discrimination’

In a new study, Stevenson’s group details “widespread discrimination” in the selection of jurors across the Deep South.

He says it’s been illegal to exclude people from jury service on the basis of race since 1875. But prosecutors can give any reason they want for dismissing a juror, and it’s rarely challenged.

Stevenson found that serious criminal cases and death penalty cases are even more prone to have discriminatory jury selection than other types of cases.

“We’ve had African-American jurors excluded because they’re too old at 43, because they’re too young at 28, while other white jurors much older are being accepted, and other white jurors much younger are being accepted.” -Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative

The study looked at eight states: Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi and South Carolina. In some counties, 80 percent of the African-Americans who had qualified for jury service were excluded.

“The evidence of racial bias that we focus on is evidence that’s pretty obvious,” said Stevenson. “It tends not to be unintentional. … We’ve had African-American jurors excluded because they’re too old at 43, because they’re too young at 28, while other white jurors much older are being accepted, and other white jurors much younger are being accepted. … We’ve had jurors excluded because they were in an interracial marriage or had a biracial son.

“It is a violation of the law,” says Stevenson, “but it is an area of the law where there has been almost no enforcement.”

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