Did you know that being LGBT is enough to have you removed from a jury? I didn’t, either.
This week, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments about a gay man who was removed from the jury in a case pertaining to the price of an HIV treatment drug. When the juror in question mentioned his same-sex partner, one of the pharmaceutical companies in the case asked that he be removed, presumably because he’d be considered “biased.”
It’s a question of who constitutes “a jury of one’s peers,” and unfortunately, it’s not a new debate.
What some have viewed as a snazzy get-out-of-jury-duty-free card is actually a confusing and contested legal practice. Courts have ruled both for and against excluding gay jurors, while some have argued that the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision barring race as grounds for juror dismissal should also extend to sexual orientation. …
This issue also draws from larger cultural debates about what an “impartial,” “normal” or “neutral” person looks like, and whether having any kind of identity marker besides those that are usually normalized into invisibility makes you inherently biased (the controversy over Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court is a good example). Juries are supposed to be composed of “peers;” questions about whether marginalized people belong on juries get to fundamental questions of equality and humanity, and whether the majority culture really considers marginalized groups its “peers.”
The debate over gay jurors is more than just a debate about one more instance of discrimination against gay people in a specific space; it’s about whether gay people should be allowed full access to the rights of American citizenship, about whether their identity means an inherent bias that keeps them from being able to weigh in on things meaningfully, and as the Abbott case illustrates, whether they should be allowed a legal voice on issues that affect them.
This Autostraddle piece about the case does a beautiful job of articulating why we should be doing more than just raising our eyebrows at a story like this. (It was also written by my favorite person in the world.) When a person can be deliberately left out of the judicial process simply for being gay, we’ve got a real problem.
Read the article and you’ll learn something. I definitely did.
