Emancipate NC attorney Ian Mance published a piece in the Campbell Law Review about North Carolina prosecutors’ use of peremptory challenges to secure an all-white jury in a capital trial involving a Black defendant. Prosecutors used a “cheat sheet” to help them come up with pretextual justifications for discriminating against Black jurors because they did not want Black people to be seated on the jury.
The use of this “cheat sheet” by prosecutors is pernicious and cynical racial discrimination. Notably, the article additionally suggests that Attorney General Josh Stein’s defense of the “cheat sheet” before the North Carolina Supreme Court lacks “good faith.”
While Attorney General Stein has been a rhetorical leader on the issue of racial justice, Emancipate NC has already called him to task in an open letter for failing to make his deeds match his words. The law review article notes:
While many of the [Attorney General’s] arguments on paper have focused on persuading the court that consideration of the matter should be procedurally barred, the office has also offered a substantive defense, asserting that, rather than “establishing any sort of intent to discriminate on the basis of race,” the document simply “establishes that the prosecutors in Tucker’s case were aware . . . that all peremptory challenges should appropriately be based on non-racial reasons.” Given what is known both about Tucker’s trial prosecutors, and the extent to which prosecutors in general have worked to distance themselves from the document, this is difficult to credit as a good faith argument. The Attorney General’s decision to make it in a capital case involving a Black defendant and an all-white jury suggests real limitations to his office’s professed commitment to racial justice.