Court Opinion

ID: 9862343
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-25 01:07:25.110336+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:25:07.102338
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE MURRAY, specially concurring: I agree with the well-reasoned majority opinion as it accurately sets forth and applies the law. As to the use of peremptory challenges to exclude minority jurors only because of their minority status, I believe it’s about time to point out that the first abuse in the common law of using challenges to exclude otherwise fair jurors was to exclude majorities rather than minorities. It occurred in Dublin, Ireland, in 1844. In 1844 the great Irish patriot, Daniel O’Connell, and eight of his political supporters were charged with conspiracy and other misdemeanors. O’Connell was the first Irish Catholic mayor of Dublin. Like Harold Washington, the first African-American mayor of Chicago, he acted with absolute impartiality to all without consideration of political or religious affiliation. The names of over 20 Irish Catholics (a majority in Dublin) were omitted from the panel of jurors from which the venire persons to decide O’Connell’s and his eight supporters’ case were to be selected. When the jury was being questioned, the English Crown found 11 more “Irish Catholics” on the panel. All 11 were challenged and excluded as jurors in the case. O’Connell and the eight were found guilty, fined and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment. O’Connell and the eight appealed, charging as the only traverser, or error, the exclusion of the 11 Irish Catholic jurors. Lord Dewman, then chief justice of England’s high court, reversed the convictions on those grounds in a strongly worded opinion. (M. Hayden & G. Moonan, A Short History of the Irish People From Earliest Times to 1920, 492-93 (1921).) Like many of today’s minorities, O’Connell remained in confinement from his conviction to the date it was overturned. I point these facts out for the sole purpose of showing that prejudice of any sort has no place in our American system of justice.