NJSBA to the NJ Supreme Court: Jury selection bias demands awareness, education, long-term solutions

In anticipation of the Judicial Conference on Jury Selection last week, the New Jersey State Bar Association (NJSBA) formed the Working Group on Jury Selection to take a hard look at the jury selection process and the role of bias in it. The judicial conference was called by the New Jersey Supreme Court in its opinion in State v. Andujar, 247 N.J. 275 (2021), which took to task a prosecutor who ran an unauthorized background check on a Black potential juror following the lower court’s denial of a for-cause dismissal of the juror.