Legal News

Dreadlocks & the Law: Are They Race-Neutral?

By Dan Slater

. . . I of course have to look at jurors in light of how I think they’re going to judge my client as well. I had some uneasiness about him. I don’t know if Your Honor recalls or not. He has – he’s about the only member of the jury I see out there with very long dreadlocks. — lawyer explaining why he struck an African-American juror in a personal injury trial

When members of a racial group are struck from a jury pool, the opposing counsel can request a Batson hearing. The proponent of the strike offers a race-neutral explanation. Then the burden shifts to the party challenging the strike to show that the explanation is mere pretext. South Carolina’s High Court, in a 3-2 vote, recently decided that counsel’s “uneasiness” over a juror’s dreadlocks didn’t meet Batson’s smell test. (Here’s a story from The State.)

The majority concluded:

Regardless of their gradual infiltration into mainstream American society, dreadlocks retain their roots as a religious and social symbol of historically black cultures. For this reason, we hold that counsel’s explanation that the juror’s dreadlocks caused him “uneasiness” was insufficient to satisfy the race-neutral requirement in the second step of the trial court’s Batson analysis.

And the dissent:

Just as the United States Supreme Court similarly noted in Purkett, the decision to wear one’s hair in the dreadlocks hairstyle is not peculiar to any race. In other cultures and more often in the past, the hairstyle has been worn as a religious choice by, for example, Hindus and Rastafarians, and is unrelated to race. In recent years, the wearing of the dreadlocks hairstyle has been practiced by both African-Americans and Caucasians, but more often by African-Americans. I would find that the choice to wear dreadlocks is a choice to wear an alternative hairstyle and is not limited to one particular race . . .

LB Readers, any thoughts on this?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 29, 2008 (boomark / email).