They Stacked The Jury And Called It Justice – OpEd

Thurgood Marshall, one of the greatest legal minds this country has ever produced, warned nearly 40 years ago that prosecutors would keep finding ways to remove Black people from juries unless the law took that power away from them. Nobody listened. And now here we are in Collin County, Texas, watching it happen all over again.

Karmelo Anthony is a 19-year-old Black kid who got into a confrontation at a high school track meet in Frisco and stabbed a white teenager who died. That is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether what he did was murder or whether he was afraid for his life and acted in self-defense. That question, that distinction between a scared teenager and a cold-blooded killer, is exactly the kind of question where who is sitting in the jury box matters enormously. And in this case, the people who got to answer that question were chosen deliberately, strategically, and with full knowledge of what the chosen jury was likely to do.

The jury that decided his fate had no Black members. Not one. Zero.

That did not happen by accident. That was the plan.

When a jury is being selected, both sides get a certain number of moves where they can remove a potential juror without having to give a reason. In theory, those moves are supposed to be race-neutral. In practice, they have been a tool of racial exclusion for as long as Black people have had the legal right to sit on juries. Prosecutors have used them for decades to quietly clear Black people out of the jury box, and the courts have largely looked the other way as long as the prosecutor offered some other excuse, any excuse, to justify the removal. In this case, the prosecution leaned heavily on striking people who worked in education, people described as too sympathetic toward young people. Black jurors who made it through early rounds of questioning were systematically removed before the final panel was seated.

The defense called it out. They raised a Batson challenge, a legal objection arguing the removals were racially motivated. The judge said no. The prosecutor’s explanations were good enough. And just like that, the trial moved forward with no Blacks on the jury in a county where Black residents make up about 10 percent of the population. A Black teenager’s life was placed in the hands of people who shared none of his experience, none of his reality, and none of his understanding of what it feels like to be young, Black and afraid in this country.

Here is what the research tells us about what happens next when that is the setup.

In one major study, Black defendants were convicted 81 percent of the time when there were no Black people in the jury pool at all. That number dropped to 71 percent, essentially the same rate as white defendants, when even one Black person was included. One person changed the entire outcome. That is not a coincidence. That is evidence that Black presence in that room forces a different kind of deliberation, a more honest reckoning with the facts.

Other research has found that whiter juries hand down longer sentences to Black defendants, including dramatically higher chances of life sentences, compared to more diverse juries deciding identical cases. And studies done after the rules were supposedly fixed show that prosecutors still remove Black jurors at more than twice the rate they remove white jurors. The system was not fixed. It adapted. It learned how to keep doing the same thing while staying just inside the legal lines.

Now think about what this particular jury had to decide. Karmelo Anthony said he was scared. He said the situation escalated fast and he felt his life was in danger. The prosecution called it a calculated “sneak” attack, a deliberate ambush on an unsuspecting victim, a framing the defense contested. The jury had to decide who was telling the truth, and more than that, they had to decide whether his fear was reasonable.

That word, reasonable, is doing a lot of work here. What feels like a credible threat to a Black teenager in a charged environment is not the same thing that registers as threatening to someone who has never had to navigate that kind of situation. Reasonableness is always filtered through experience. And when the people deciding what counts as reasonable have no shared experience with the person whose life is on the line, the verdict is shaped by that absence before a single word of testimony is heard. Research confirms that diverse juries deliberate longer, consider more evidence, and reach more equitable outcomes. The jury in this case was not a neutral fact-finding body. It was a structural advantage for the prosecution.

The jury convicted him. He got 35 years. He will not see a parole board until he is in his mid-thirties, if then.

Supporters of the verdict will say the process was legal. They are right, and that is the most damning part of this entire story. The prosecutor followed the rules. The judge followed the rules. And a 19-year-old Black kid is going to spend the better part of his life in a Texas prison because the rules were designed to allow exactly this. Legal and just are not the same thing. They have never been the same thing in this country when Black lives are what is being weighed.

So what do we do about it?

First, end peremptory strikes entirely or place strict numerical and demographic limits on their use. Several states and countries have already moved in this direction. There is no constitutional right to remove a juror without explanation. That power exists by tradition, and tradition is not a good enough reason to keep handing prosecutors a tool they have used to rig outcomes for generations.

Second, require courts to collect and publish data on the race of jurors struck by each side in every criminal trial. Transparency alone will not fix this, but it creates a public record that exposes patterns prosecutors currently hide behind case-by-case explanations. Sunshine is not justice, but it is a precondition for it.

Third, establish meaningful demographic benchmarks for jury composition in cases involving defendants of color. When the final jury panel looks nothing like the community it is supposed to represent, that gap should trigger automatic review, not a shrug and a gavel.

Fourth, strengthen appellate review of Batson challenges. Right now, a trial judge’s decision to accept a prosecutor’s race-neutral explanation is almost never overturned on appeal. That near-total deference has made the rule nearly meaningless. Appellate courts need to take these challenges seriously rather than rubber-stamping whatever explanation the prosecution offers at the trial level.

Finally, communities need to show up. Attend trials. Watch jury selection. Document who gets removed and ask why. Prosecutors make calculated decisions partly because they believe no one is watching closely enough to hold them accountable. Make them wrong about that.

Thurgood Marshall saw all of this coming. He said clearly that if you leave prosecutors with the power to quietly shape who sits in that box, they will use it, and they will keep using it until something forces them to stop. He was right then. He is still right now.

Now ask yourself this: if a white defendant sat down in that courtroom and the prosecution systematically removed every single white juror until the panel was entirely Black, this country would have burned that courthouse down. There would be wall to wall coverage, congressional hearings, and demands for immediate reform. The silence we accept when it happens to Black defendants is not neutrality. It is a choice. Until we manufacture the same outrage in both directions, until a “no-black” jury in a Black defendant’s case produces the same national fury as an all-Black jury in a white defendant’s case would, no Black person in this country can walk into a courtroom and trust that justice is what they are there to receive. Karmelo Anthony is serving 35 years as the latest proof. The next one is already in a courtroom somewhere. The only question is whether we are going to keep letting them do this in our name.