LA Focus: Black Women Matter, Especially on Juries

AS Cross, Contributor | September 16, 2026

The Ninth Circuit declined to recognize a Batson claim for discrimination against Black women, leaving unresolved how courts address bias at the intersection of race and gender.

For the first time in my adult life, I had jury duty this year. It was a criminal case, ordinary and standard on its face. The jury was selected, both sides presented their cases, and we received our instructions: decide whether the prosecution had proven guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

And off we went to deliberate.

Some of us were more vocal than others, but we made sure to hear from everyone. In the end, we could not reach a unanimous verdict. The judge thanked us for our service and dismissed us. The experience felt fairly unremarkable—at least on the surface.

Only later did something strike me. During jury selection, the defense attorney seemed to want me on the jury; I was the last juror selected before the remaining members of the pool were dismissed. During deliberations, aside from a couple of people who changed positions, jurors sharing one particular view also seemed to share the defendant’s ethnic and cultural background.

It made me wonder: How much can race, ethnicity and gender matter—not simply in deliberations, but in deciding who gets to deliberate in the first place?

Around this time, I learned of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision upholding the conviction in U.S. v. Mark Ridley-Thomas. My purpose is not to relitigate the charges against him. But as a Black woman who had just served on a jury, one aspect of his case caught my attention.

Prosecutors used peremptory challenges to strike the only two Black women in the jury pool.

The first, Juror 13, had expressed views about legacy admissions that the prosecution questioned. The defense later pointed out that a white woman who expressed a similar view was not struck. Prosecutors also cited Juror 13’s local-government experience, although another prospective juror with extensive local-government experience remained.

Later, prosecutors struck Juror 1, the only Black woman left in the pool. They cited her demeanor—including alleged headshaking and looking downward—as well as tinted glasses she initially wore and the fact that she was unemployed. Defense counsel disputed observing the alleged headshaking; the trial judge said she had not seen it either. Earlier, the judge had complimented Juror 1 on how she answered questions during voir dire.

Ridley-Thomas’s lawyers challenged the strikes under Batson v. Kentucky, the landmark Supreme Court decision prohibiting race-based peremptory challenges. The Supreme Court later extended that principle to gender.

The trial judge rejected the challenges.

But consider what remained.

There were Black jurors.

There were women jurors.

There were no Black women.

That became an important issue on appeal. Ridley-Thomas’s attorneys argued not only that the individual strikes were improperly evaluated, but that Batson itself should recognize discrimination against an intersectional group: Black women.

The Ninth Circuit had encountered the issue four years earlier in Nguyen v. Frauenheim, after prosecutors struck three Hispanic women. The court called recognition of combined race-and-gender classes “worthy of consideration.” But because Nguyen involved federal review of an already-final state conviction, procedural rules prevented the court from applying such a new constitutional rule to his case.

Ridley-Thomas came before the Ninth Circuit on direct appeal, without that same procedural barrier.

Yet the panel declined to decide the issue differently. Neither the Supreme Court nor the Ninth Circuit had recognized an intersectional Batson claim, it said: “We decline to do so today.”

And so the question remains: What happens when the law looks separately for discrimination against Black people and discrimination against women, but the alleged discrimination occurs against Black women?

Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw gave us a vocabulary for precisely this problem. She coined “intersectionality” to explain how overlapping identities can produce forms of discrimination that disappear when each identity is examined separately.

A Black woman’s experience cannot always be understood by asking only whether Black people were treated differently or whether women were treated differently. Sometimes the intersection is the point.

That is what makes the Ridley-Thomas jury issue important beyond Ridley-Thomas.

The presence of Black jurors does not necessarily answer whether Black women were treated fairly. Neither does the presence of women. If discrimination occurs at the intersection of race and gender, examining each separately can make the affected group legally invisible.

The dismissal based partly on “demeanor” particularly caught my attention. Demeanor sounds neutral, but it is inherently subjective. Black women have long confronted stereotypes about being angry, difficult or aggressive. That does not prove what motivated prosecutors in this case. It does demonstrate why subjective explanations deserve careful scrutiny: assumptions can influence judgment without anyone consciously announcing them.

To be clear, there is no evidence that seating either Black woman would have changed the Ridley-Thomas verdict. I cannot say they would have viewed the evidence differently.

No one can.

That is not my claim.

My question comes earlier: Does our system adequately protect against discrimination in deciding who gets the opportunity to deliberate at all?

The Constitution guarantees criminal defendants an impartial jury. But impartiality does not mean jurors arrive without experiences, assumptions or unconscious biases. None of us does. A jury’s strength comes partly from putting different people around one table and requiring them to test their perceptions against one another before deciding another person’s fate.

That was certainly true in my jury room.

I worked alongside people who saw the case differently than I did. So I asked them to convince me. I wanted to understand what they saw that I did not. Understanding their perspective did not require me to agree. But listening—and genuinely wrestling with a view I did not share—mattered.

A person’s life was in our hands.

That responsibility does not begin in the deliberation room. It begins with deciding who gets a seat at the table.

Batson was decided 40 years ago because our justice system recognized that excluding people from juries because of race harms not only defendants, but the integrity of the judicial process. The law later recognized the same principle for gender.

The question now is whether the law can see what happens where race and gender meet.

The Ridley-Thomas case gave the Ninth Circuit an opportunity to confront that question without the procedural obstacle it encountered in Nguyen. The court declined.

Whatever one’s view of Mark Ridley-Thomas, the prosecution against him or the jury’s verdict, the constitutional question did not disappear when the court declined to answer it.

Neither did the Black women standing at that intersection.

If justice requires jurors to examine their blind spots before deciding another person’s fate, surely the law should be willing to examine its own.

AS Cross is a local freelance writer who works at the intersection of gender, race, faith and culture.