NEW YORK CITY — A former Queens prosecutor faces an ethics complaint over a decades-old “cheat sheet” for jury selection that attorneys argued he used toward one of its stated goals: “Get white jurors.”
And the ethics complaint against Christopher McGrath is the only one filed this week that accused a current or former prosecutor of jury bias.
Law professors with Civil Rights Corps filed 10 grievances that seek discipline against prosecutors who were found to have removed, or tried to remove, prospective jurors who were Black, Latino, Muslim, Jewish, among other groups.
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“Removing jurors based on their race defies even the most basic principles of ethical, let alone constitutional or moral, behavior,” said Steve Zeidman, a CUNY School of Law professor who authored one of the complaints, in a statement.
U.S. Supreme Court justices in Batson v. Kentucky barred prosecutors from trying to or successfully excluding people because of their race. Doing so is called a “Batson violation” — and all the grievances filed are against current and former prosecutors who were found to have committed this purposeful discrimination and yet did not face public discipline, according to the lawsuits.
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Six of the filings first reported by Gothamist involve prosecutors from the Queens District Attorney’s office. Four of those prosecutors remain on the staff, according to the law professors.
A spokesperson for the Queens District Attorney declined to comment.
“As there is litigation pending as to how this office is able to respond to complaints filed with the grievance committee, we are unable to comment at this time,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
One of the former Queens prosecutors is McGrath, who works for the New York City Police Benevolent Association union, according to the lawsuit.
The grievance against McGrath includes a copy of what a judge had called a “jury discrimination cheat sheet — a smoking gun evincing pernicious and invidious discrimination clearly designed to eviscerate the constitutional right to be tried by a jury of one’s peers.”
“The jury selection guide described Black neighborhoods as either ‘good’ or ‘IFFY,'” the grievance states. “The script demanded ‘no Hispanics,’ wrote then crossed out ‘No Jews,’ encouraged the prevention of ‘too many females’ on the jury, warned of prospective jurors from a ‘Prof, Jews, Middle Class’ neighborhood, and cautioned against allowing Italian-American prospective jurors to serve if the defendant is Italian-American. The notes further detailed an intent to preclude women from serving as jurors by advising prosecutors to ‘stay away from’ ‘grandmotherly types’ and ‘motherly types.'”
McGrath admitted used the cheat sheet during jury selections for trials in the 1990s, according to the grievance.
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A PBA spokesperson didn’t return a request for comment.
Read all the grievances here.
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