Considered guilty of sin, lepers faced great prejudice in ancient societies. Jesus, moved by compassion, modeled a different response in this Sunday’s gospel. A university’s death-penalty study has the potential to offer a new model for death-row inmates in North Carolina who are trying to prove that racial prejudice played a significant role in the selection of the juries that determined their punishment. The study finds that blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to be dismissed as potential jurors in such cases.

North Carolina passed the Racial Justice Act in 2009, making it the first state in the country to give death-row inmates a chance to have their sentences changed to life without parole if they can prove that race played a significant role in determining punishment.

A study by researchers at Michigan State University may prove to be instrumental in showing this kind of bias. In 173 cases between 1990 and 2010, the study examined decisions involving 7,421 potential jurors (82 percent were white; 16 percent were black). In cases where there was at least one black potential juror, prosecutors dismissed more than twice as many blacks from the jury (56 percent) as others (25 percent). When the defendant was black, the disparity was even greater.

Even accounting for “alternative explanations” besides race for different “strike rates”--for instance, excluding those who expressed ambivalence about the death penalty--the study found blacks were still more than twice as likely to be dismissed. Under a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court case, it is unconstitutional for a prosecutor to strike any potential juror on the basis of race, ethnicity, or gender.

Source: An editorial by the New York Times