Jude Verdict and Jury PoolLee Holloway Offers his take

Today, Milwaukee County STILL Chairman Lee Holloway issued the following (cut and pasted from his release):

Yesterday Chairman of the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors Lee Holloway sent Clerk of Circuit Court John Barrett a series of letters focusing on jury selection, as a follow-up to past letters on the same issue. “An unrepresentative jury is an unfair jury,” said Chairman Holloway in announcing his plans to initiate a County audit of jury services. The audit will examine jury trials over the past year in Milwaukee County courts, comparing the demographical composition of juries to that of the defendant and victim. The audit will also analyze reasons for juror disqualification and if management decisions may be affecting the diversity of the jury pool. The results of the County audit will help determine whether the recent issuing of a not-guilty verdict by an all white jury in the case involving the beating of Mr. Frank Jude, Jr., who is bi-racial, was an anomaly or a signal of a systemic problem in our justice system.

The Chairman noted that the County audit might expose problems and recommend remedies, so “we can start restoring the community’s faith in Milwaukee’s courts.” The Chairman further urged the Clerk to explore ways to broaden the prospective juror list using options available under current state law. Immediately after the selection of an all-white jury in the Jude case, Chairman Holloway sent correspondence to Clerk Barrett objecting to the Circuit Court’s sole dependence on a Department of Transportation list of licensed drivers and persons with state identification cards for jurors. Citing the June 2005 research of the Employment Training Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which found that less than half of African American and Hispanic adults in the County have a valid driver’s license, the Chairman wrote,

“we must be vigilant in our efforts to ensure that our processes for jury selection are not unfairly excluding those individuals whom research demonstrates are most likely not to have a driver’s license: the elderly; transit users; the poor; women; renters; younger adults; university students; people with disabilities; and people of color.”

Wisconsin Statutes allow the Clerk to create a master list for juror selection by supplementing the DOT list with a combination of these secondary sources: voter registration lists; telephone and municipal directories; utility company lists; lists of payers of real property taxes; lists of high school graduates; and recipients of Wisconsin Works.

Read the whole thing.

The line I found most interesting:

The results of the County audit will help determine whether the recent issuing of a not-guilty verdict by an all white jury in the case involving the beating of Mr. Frank Jude, Jr., who is bi-racial, was an anomaly or a signal of a systemic problem in our justice system.

Holloway appears to be claiming as fact that the all-white jury would automatically have found Jude guilty. He's not proposing the audit to determine if the composition of the jury was an anomaly, but if the verdict by that jury was.

????

I've written about the code of silence among some officers and I was shocked by the verdicts in the Jude case. But a trial did happen. Holloway lets Milwaukee District Attorney E. Michael McCann of the hook here.

No repercussions for charging decisions.

No concerns over which witnesses were and were not called.

No worries over how the case was presented.

Holloway seems to think that there is a formula 12 White Jurors, judging three white officers, charged with beating a bi-racial man equals not guilty. And he's going to conduct an audit to prove it.