CNN’s Jeremy Diamond Asks Kamala Harris About Mostly-White Ahmaud Arbery Jury: ‘Do You Believe Justice Can Still Be Done?’
CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond asked Vice President Kamala Harris about the whiteness of the jury in the trial for the murder of unarmed Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery.
On Friday, Harris held a press conference to punctuate her trip to France, and took questions from American and French reporters on a range of issues. Among them was the trial of the three White men — 64-year-old Gregory McMichael, his 34-year-old son, Travis McMichael, and 50-year-old William “Roddie” Bryan — charged in the murder of Arbery.
In particular, Diamond asked about the racial makeup of the jury in the case.
Diamond noted that “While you’ve been here in Paris this week, Americans have been closely watching the trial of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, 11 of the 12 jurors in this trial are White. Only one of them is Black despite 26 percent of that county’s demographic being Black. The judge in this case even said that there appears to have been intentional discrimination in the selection of that jury.”
“So do you believe that justice can still be done given the history of jury discrimination in the United States? Do you believe that reforms are needed to ensure that juries represent a representative of the jurisdictions that those courts serve?” Diamond asked.
Harris described constraints that prevented her from commenting on this specific case, but called for reforms that she has long supported.
“I’m not going to comment on any active trials. For obvious reasons, I don’t want to in any way influence or distract from what are the facts and the evidence in that case,” the VP said.
“But… on the broader point, we have still a lot of work that we can do to improve the integrity of our criminal justice system,” Harris said, and went on to add that she supports “ensuring that protections are in place so that anyone that is accused of a crime and charged with a crime has a jury of their peers,” including paid leave for jurors.
“There is work that we’ve always had to do, and we actually have embedded in the jury selection procedure, specific objections that on behalf of a client, a lawyer can make when it becomes clear that there is a systematic and racially-based exclusion of potential jurors. So we always have to have protections in place in our criminal justice system as a whole, including in our jury selection system,” Harris said.
Watch above via Reuters.
