Never before in North Carolina judicial history have trial judges taken accusations of racial discrimination against Black jurors seriously, if a White prosecutor had a Black juror struck from a prospective jury primarily on the basis of race through preemptory challenge – which is illegal – the trial judge traditionally did little to investigate, and the Black juror was removed.
In a 6-1 decision, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that trial judges must take a harder look as to the reasons why, when they see Black jurors summarily dismissed from juries by prosecutors.
In North Carolina’s 2020’s State of NC v. Hobbs, Jr., the N.C. Supreme Court ordered the lower courts to make sure that prosecutors weren’t getting away with illegally racially shaping the juries they wanted because trial judges refused to do their due diligence.
In the 2014 Cedric Hobbs Jr. murder case, the trial judge inappropriately allowed a Cumberland County prosecutor to dismiss three Black jurors from Hobbs’s jury “…without fully considering the evidence that race was a key factor in their strikes,” cites the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham.
The Hobbs ruling not only forces trial judges to pay attention to how many disproportionate times qualified Black jurors are stricken from a particular county’s jury pool, but also, if state appellate courts are paying attention to claims of juror racial discrimination.
