In the News

A growing number of people have been ignoring their jury summons and it’s raising a red flag for trial judges in criminal court.

In a 2023 poll, the National Judicial College found that 58% of trial judges polled said they’ve noticed several people ignoring their summonses. That sometimes can lead to a trial being put on hold.

Will Snowden is the founder of the Juror Project and director of the New Orleans office of Vera Institute of Justice. Will spoke to Collab in Action about the Juror Project, a nonprofit that aims to increase the diversity of jury panels and change perspectives on jury duty through community education. Will also spoke about the focus of his current and upcoming work at Vera.

We had the chance to sit down with Will Snowden, an alumni from Louisiana who graduated from Leaders of Color in 2020 to talk about criminal justice inequity in Louisiana.

Will is a criminal defense lawyer, jury duty nerd, and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, College of Law. Will's legal career began as a public defender in New Orleans, LA, where he witnessed the discriminatory practices removing jurors from the jury panel and took his fight from the courtroom to the community and created The Juror Project.

As efforts to reform the criminal justice system at the federal level have largely stalled, state policymakers are opening a new front in the fight to reduce bias in the system by aiming to eliminate racial discrimination in jury selection.

When it comes to convicting police officers, clear and convincing evidence is only half the battle. During former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder trial this spring, prosecutors told the jury repeatedly: “You can believe your eyes”—a reference to the brutal video showing Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes—“That it’s a homicide, it’s murder.”

Juries hold tremendous power in our legal system. They determine who lives, who dies, and who goes free. The right to a jury of our peers is enshrined in the Constitution, guaranteeing us all the right to a “speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.” And yet, juries in America remain overwhelmingly white, even in cases with Black victims and defendants. The Equal Justice Initiative found that white juries spend less time deliberating outcomes, consider fewer perspectives, and ultimately, make more errors.

Will Snowden received his law degree from Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey and worked as a public defender in New Orleans. Through his work in the justice system, he became concerned with weaknesses in our jury system that led to a lack of diversity in jury members and ultimately, unjust outcomes.

In response, Will established The Juror Project, whose mission is “to change the makeup of juries to better represent the American population and the communities most commonly accused. We pursue this through community and public education about jury eligibility and the jury selection process and the power jurors hold in America’s high stakes criminal justice system.”

Faced with data showing that federal jury pools in the New Orleans area steeply underrepresent its Black population, the judges of the Eastern District of Louisiana last month changed their rules for gathering those names for the first time in seven years.

When the U.S. Supreme Court decided on April 20 to overrule a 40-year-old precedent and declare nonunanimous jury verdicts in criminal cases to be unconstitutional, it was a feast for many legal observers.

They focused on the multiple opinions penned by the justices, the different ways justices handled the thorny legal history of the issue and the implications for the court's approach to overruling precedent.

But for advocates in Louisiana and Oregon, the only two states to allow nonunanimous convictions in recent decades, the focus was on the impact the ruling could have on convicted people in their states.

Tuesday, Jan. 7 marks ten years since the last execution in Louisiana.

Church leaders and advocates will gathered Tuesday at the capitol to discuss the topic with the hopes to abolish the policy.

An estimated 19.8 million people in the United States have a felony conviction and are therefore excluded from serving on juries in federal courts, as well as courts in 27 states. Several other states technically allow felons to serve on juries, but the right is contingent upon factors like parole, time of release, and approval from the prison system. Only one state, Maine, has no law regarding the matter.

As the state prepares to vote on several key laws in November, many voters are turning their attention to the split verdict issue in Louisiana. 48 states in the US require unanimous verdicts in felony trials, but Louisiana is not one of them. NolaVie's David Benedetto speaks with William Snowden, a federal trial attorney and founder of The Juror Project. The group aims to increase diversity on juries and challenge perspectives on jury duty.

The New Orleans Police Department had the highest rate of credible accusations of police abuse in the whole country, then-U.S. Attorney Kenneth Polite told an auditorium of black high school boys at a 2014 forum to discuss friction between the police and black communities.  In a Department of Justice report that eventually led to the Police Department entering into a consent decree, investigators found that "NOPD's failure to ensure that its officers respect the Constitution and the rule of law undermines trust within the very communities whose cooperation the Department most needs to enforce the law and prevent crime."

Past and current attorneys of the New Orleans Public Defenders Office tell Anderson Cooper they believe innocent clients have gone to jail because they lacked the time and resources to defend them properly. The system is so overburdened that in 2016 New Orleans Chief Public Defender Derwyn Bunton began ordering his staff to refuse to take on clients facing the most serious felonies.

"I had a particular experience my second year being a public defender. It was a trial involving a case where a client was charged with maybe two crack rocks and three pills. He didn't have a prescription for the pills, and obviously crack cocaine is an illegal substance to have. He had gone to trial before and lost on this very same case, and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. The case came back on appeal, as a result of something that's called Batson violation which tries to ensure prosecutors aren’t illegitimately removing people of color from the jury.

“Our constitution requires there should be proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” Esman said.  “If two people out of 12 are not convinced of somebody’s guilt, then by definition that is reasonable doubt.”

Orleans public defender Will Snowden said the ability to disregard the doubts of two jurors undermines justice. 

“People are having their constitutional rights violated,” he said.

"What if the most policed communities had more leverage in deciding the outcome of criminal cases? After three years of defending some of poorest people in New Orleans, the most incarcerated city on earth, local public defender Will Snowden launched the Juror Project; an initiative aimed to diversify jury panels in terms of race, thought, experience, socioeconomic background, and more."

"If you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be appointed to you – that’s how it’s supposed to work. But in New Orleans, Chief Public Defender Derwyn Bunton, the lawyer in charge of representing poor people accused of crimes, is saying no. His office doesn’t have enough money or time to do a good job, he says, so he’s refusing some serious cases, which is jamming up the courts and leaving hundreds of people stuck in jail with no lawyer. Bunton’s goal? To break the system in order to fix it."