The complexity of race and juries

Cheryl Thomas's fascinating recent research report for the Ministry of Justice, Are Juries Fair?, has rightly attracted media attention. It claims that all-white juries do not discriminate against either non-white defendants or non-white victims of crime. This is welcome news, because the way we constitute juries in this country means that most will be exclusively white – even in towns, like Nottingham, with substantial ethnic minority enclaves. Still, it would be premature to conclude from the findings that all-white juries are fair. On the contrary, what Thomas seems to have uncovered is the complexity of race relations in Britain, and the unpredictable, sometimes puzzling, ways in which race affects jury trials