A quarter of Black New Jerseyans can’t serve on juries. A new law could change that.

With about a quarter of Black residents in New Jersey banned for life from serving on a jury due to past criminal convictions, legislators and activists are advocating a change in the law so jury duty is open to all.

A similar effort is underway in New York state, which also prohibits jury service for those with past felony convictions. The New York Civil Liberties Union estimates that more than 40% of Black men are disqualified from jury service in Manhattan alone.

In New Jersey, the legislation to end the prohibition on jury service has lingered in the Legislature without final action for years, but Gov. Phil Murphy's endorsement earlier this month gave it new life. Twenty-two states allow those with felony convictions to serve on juries, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, which also has an ongoing class-action suit challenging the jury exclusion.

Murphy, a Democrat, said that 500,000 New Jersey residents are barred from jury service, and “restoring these individuals’ right to perform a fundamental civic duty is not just about ending an injustice that continues to plague our formerly incarcerated neighbors — it is also about defending the integrity of our democracy, our criminal justice system, and the rule of law.”

A study from the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice found that 23% to 29% of Black New Jerseyans — 219,000 to 269,000 people — cannot serve on a jury. And that means that Black people, who are already far more likely to be arrested and incarcerated than white people, are not being judged by a jury of their peers, according to the institute.

Emily Schwartz, senior counsel with the institute, said there are two key obligations for citizens enumerated in the U.S. Constitution — voting and jury service. New Jersey added the prohibition on jury service for those with criminal records in the years after the Civil War, according to Schwartz, who added that the ban was briefly lifted in the 1990s and then reinstated.

“We know our system disproportionately prosecutes Black and brown individuals and New Jersey is actually, unfortunately, a real leader in the racial disparities of our criminal legal system,” she said. “So, if we have that on one end, and then we have this other disparity in the jury room, it's really calling into question: Who’s a jury of our peers?”

The proper process for eliminating jurors should happen before trial, when lawyers from both sides interview people called for jury duty, she said.

Schwartz endorses a version of the bill in the New Jersey Senate that drops the prohibition for all formerly incarcerated people. She opposes an Assembly version that would continue the ban for those convicted of murder and aggravated sexual assault.

“We're talking about almost a third of all Black New Jerseyans can't even walk into the jury room,” she said in an interview. “It's unacceptable, and if we start creating carve-outs based on perceptions of offenses, you're not really going to get to the issue here that we're dealing with, which is we want to have robust juries.”

Supporters say the formerly convicted understand the stakes involved when someone is on trial, and have not been found to be lenient to accused criminals.

At the bill's last legislative hearing, Antonne Henshaw, who was convicted of murder in 1989, asked New Jersey legislators: “When do I become like you? When do I become a full citizen? When do I enjoy the rights of being an American citizen in the state of New Jersey?...Every time I turn around, my conviction is used to dehumanize me over and over and over again.”

And when the bill came up in the New Jersey Assembly's judiciary committee last year, Republican Assemblymember Robert Auth was the only one to vote against it. He questioned whether someone convicted of a Ponzi scheme should be allowed to sit on a jury weighing a case involving a company alleged to have caused harm.

“If someone displays poor judgment repeatedly, over and over and over again, you’re telling me that you still feel that they’re an appropriate person to possibly sit in judgment of someone who maybe has never committed a crime in their entire life?” Auth asked. “You’re telling me that that’s the type of person we want to have on the jury?”

He added: “The defendant must have the best possible notion that they are being judged by a group of his or her peers, and by doing this we’re denying the public and the defendant the best possible opportunity for justice.”

In New York, state Sen. Cordell Cleare, a Democrat, is sponsoring a bill to allow those with felony convictions to serve on juries. Cleare said she was inspired by the high incarceration rates in and around her district in Harlem.

“You have people who have not only lived experience — having lived through certain social and racial conditions — but people who have also gone through a penal system and may have been over-punished, may have been rightfully punished, may have been wrongfully punished, but they have all of these experiences to contribute to a jury pool,” Cleare said in an interview.

Cleare said juries in New York don’t reflect the city's racial makeup. “In almost every court you go into it’s overwhelmingly Black and brown people before the bench,” she said. “You see the stark differences between who’s coming before the bench, who’s on the bench, and who’s in the jury box.”