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Tim Kaine Previously Used Race to Shape a Jury in a Civil Trial

Tim Kaine / AP
August 29, 2016

Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine used race to strike three potential jurors from a civil trial in Richmond, Va. nearly 30 years ago, the Daily Beast reported Monday.

In a 1989 article published for the University of Richmond Law Review, Kaine detailed a case during which he used racially motivated stereotypes about white and black people to shape a jury that he believed would favor his clients.

Kaine opened the article describing his effort to include a black person on the jury in a housing discrimination case involving a black plaintiff.

The defendant’s attorney employed a legal tactic called peremptory strike on the day of the trial to prevent three black members of the jury’s pool from serving on the panel. Kaine responded by using the same maneuver to oust three white jurors from the panel, allowing him to get one black person on the jury.

"I struck three white veniremen, not because they were unsympathetic individuals, but purely to increase the odds that the jury would have at least one black representative," Kaine wrote.

He said he was not concerned about legal ethics, but rather of securing a sympathetic jury.

"The notion that common stereotypes have some truth cannot, as a factual matter, be completely denied," he continued. "While conventional wisdom about how different ethnic groups respond in civil or criminal trials has not withstood statistical studies, the notion that a juror may be more inclined toward a party of her own race is not necessarily a racist assumption unsupported by facts."

The Supreme Court ruled in Batson v. Kentucky a few years before Kaine’s article was published that criminal prosecutors could not use race as the sole basis to bar potential jurors from hearing a case, the Daily Beast noted. In 1991, two years after Kaine’s article ran, the Supreme Court ruled in Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete that the same applied to civil trials.

Racial issues have come to the forefront of the 2016 presidential election. More than 75 percent of Hillary Clinton supporters said the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities is "very important" to their vote, according to a July Pew Research survey.