CONSTRUCTING A JURY THAT IS BOTH IMPARTIAL AND REPRESENTATIVE - UTILIZING CUMULATIVE VOTING IN JURY SELECTION

One of the main and ongoing problems plaguing the American jury system has been ensuring that juries in civil and criminal trials are truly representative of the communities in which they serve. Historically, m inorities have been disproportionately excluded from jury service This shortfall results from a combination of factors at each stage of the juror identification process. At the jury pool stage, juror notificati on methods often fail to identify or reach minorities for the simple r eason that minorities generally are poorer and more transient. At the venire stage, those minorities who actually receive notification repor t to the courthouse at a lower rate than the majority because they ign ore the summons and claim hardship more often. Finally, at the petit j ury stage, prosecutors and other litigants typically eliminate most, i f not all, minority venirepersons through the use of both peremptory a nd for cause strikes. Authors Edward Adams and Christian Lane take on this problem of underrepresentation on juries by focusing on the latte r stage of jury selection-the use of peremptory strikes. They argue th at prosecutors often use peremptories in a discriminatory manner to el iminate potential jurors based on their race. The authors argue that a lthough it intended to remedy the striking of minority venirepersons f or racial reasons, the Supreme Court in Batson v. Kentucky failed to d eter the practice effectively. Batson prohibits the striking of jurors based on race, but allows the use of peremptory challenges with a ''r ace neutral'' explanation. Dean Adams and Mr. Lane propose a new metho d of jury selection which dispenses with peremptory challenges and whi ch, they assert, will rid the jury selection process of discrimination . Borrowing a concept from corporate law, they propose a new method ba sed on a cumulative voting model. The authors contend that this new me thod for impaneling juries is free of the pitfalls that plague the cur rent system and other alternative proposals. They argue that adopting their method will result in more representative juries.