Abstract
On November 24, 1963, just two days after the nation had been shocked by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Americans watched in horror as Jack Ruby shot and killed accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in a Dallas police station garage, in full view of television cameras. The world-famous attorney Melvin Belli represented Ruby at his jury trial. One of Belli’s first actions on behalf of Ruby was to try to get the trial moved out of Dallas. Belli later recounted his reasons for this in a special hearing to change the location of the trial:
Dallas was a cesspool of prejudice. Out of that pool, I argued, we couldn’t get a jury that was unbiased. How was it biased? It was my primary contention that the city of Dallas itself would be on trial as much as Jack Ruby was. Dallas had been shamed by the assassination of President Kennedy, doubly shamed by letting the President’s assassin be killed in the Dallas police station itself. And so, a Dallas jury had to convict Ruby in order to acquit Dallas.1
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Notes
Belli, M. M. (1976). My Life on Trial. Toronto: Popular Library.
Ibid., p. 300.
Ibid., p. 319.
Kairys, D., Schulman, J., and Harring, S. (Eds.) (1975). The Jury System: New Methods for Reducing Prejudice. Cambridge, Mass.: National Jury Project and National Lawyers Guild.
Cartwright, R. E. (1977). Jury selection. Trial, 13, 28–31.
Hans, V. P. (1982a). Jury selection in two countries: A psychological perspective. Current Psychological Reviews, 2, 283–300. Hans, V. P. (1983). Unpublished data.
Hans (1983), unpublished data.
Hans, V. P., and Vidmar, N. (1982). Jury selection. In N. L. Kerr and R. M. Bray (Eds.) The Psychology of the Courtroom. New York: Academic Press.
Strauderv. West Virginia 100 U.S. 303 (1880); Carter v. Texas 177 U.S. 442 (1900); Norris v. Alabama 294 U.S. 587 (1935); Thiel v. Southern Pacific Company 328 U.S. 217 (1946); Patton v. Mississippi 332 U.S. 463 (1947); Hernandez v. Texas 347 U.S. 475 (1954); Whitus v. Georgia 385 U.S. 545 (1967); Carter v. Jury Comm. of Greene County 396 U.S. 320 (1970); Taylor v. Louisiana 419 U.S. 522 (1975).
Cloward’s testimony is excerpted from the Seale-Huggins hearing, October 15, 1970, New Haven, Conn. (pp. 438–439 of transcript). It is quoted in Van Dyke, J. (1977). Jury Selection Procedures. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger.
Davis, R. (1973). Black jurors. Guild Practitioner, 30, 112–113. Quoted in Van Dyke (1977).
Gillespie, M. (1980, April). What the Miami race riots mean to all of us. Ms., p. 87.
Van Dyke (1977).
Hans, V. P. (1982b). Gentlewomen of the jury. Paper presented at the meeting of the Law and Society Association, Toronto.
Hans (1982a).
Hoyt v. Florida 368 U.S. 57 (1961).
State v. Hall 187 So. 2d 861 (Miss), appeal dismissed 385 U.S. 98 (1966).
Taylor v. Louisiana (1975).
Glasser v. United States 315 U.S. 60 (1942).
Jury Selection and Service Act of 1968, 28 U.S.C. 1861–1869. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Kairys, D., Kadane, B., and Lehoczky, P. (1977). Jury representativeness: A mandate for multiple source lists. California Law Review, 65, 776–827.
Ginger, A. F. (Ed.) (1975). Jury Selection in Criminal Trials. Tiburón, Calif.: Law Press.
Thiel v. Southern Pacific Company (1946).
Ibid., p. 224.
New York v. Attica Brothers, Erie County Superior Court, June 27, 1974.
State of New Jersey v. Long, decided January 7, 1985. See also Report on the Atlantic County Jury Selection System, submitted to Judge Raul R. Porreca, October 30, 1984, by David Kairys, Robert Moran, and Barry Cooper.
We based our account on the Joan Little trial and related research on an excellent discussion of the role social scientists played in that trial: McConahay, J., Mullin, C, and Frederick, J. (1977). The uses of social science in trials with political and racial overtones: The trial of Joan Little. Law and Contemporary Problems, 41, 205–229.
Vidmar, N., and Judson, J. (1981). The use of social science in a change of venue application. Canadian Bar Review, 59, 76–102.
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© 1986 Valerie P. Hans and Neil Vidmar
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Hans, V.P., Vidmar, N. (1986). A Jury of Peers—But from an Unbiased Community. In: Judging the Jury. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6463-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6463-2_4
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