The supreme court of the United States ruled last week that Spanish-speaking prospective jurors

can be barred from serving on juries that are expected to hear the interpreted testimony of
Spanish-speaking witnesses. Reactions from civil rights groups, particularly those most closely
associated with the Hispanic community, were immediate, loud and overwhelmingly negative.

“The Reagan-Bush right-wing kangaroo court has once again shown its complete contempt for the
rights of Hispanic Americans”, said Consuela M. Jimenez-Kunstler, chairperson of United Citizens
of Latin Extraction (UCLE) immediately after the court’s decision was announced.

At first glance, one might be tempted to agree with Ms. Jimenez-Kunstler. But let´s stop and
consider whose rights are actually at stake here.

Jury duty as its name may suggest to those who are paying attention, is a duty, not a right.
Spanish-speaking citizens do not have a right to be empaneled as jurors. They, like their less
fortunate monolingual fellow citizens, have an obligation to serve on a jury when called upon to
do so. This obligation arises out of a defendant right to a jury of his (her) peers and to a fair trial in
general. Thus, the rights of Spanish-speaking citizens are not even at issue in this decision in so far
as the citizens in question are members of the pool of prospective jurors and not themselves
defendants.

But what of the defendant’s rights? Without going into the specifics of the case upon which the
court’s decision was based, it’s fairly easy to surmise that cases in which testimony will be given in
Spanish will often (though by no means always) be cases involving a Hispanic defendant. Are the
rights of such a defendant infringed upon by the exclusion of Spanish-speaking persons from his or
her jury? Clearly, as courts have long ruled, the exclusion of persons from juries based on race,
ethnicity, or skin color is unacceptable. Certainly the systematic exclusion from a jury of persons
who share the defendant’s ethnicity would tend to deny the defendant a fair trial.

But the court’s recent ruling applies not to race or ethnicity, but to language. “Pshaw!” Ms.
Jimenez-Kunstler might well reply –the distinction is nothing more than a flimsy veil for blatant
racism. But is it? What legitimate purpose might be served by barring speakers of a particular
language from serving on a particular jury?

The same purpose that is served by barring a realtor from serving in a case involving real estate
fraud or a nuclear physicist from serving in a case involving nuclear power plant safety –that is, no
juror must have, or believe himself to have, superior independent knowledge of the subject
matter of the trial. Jurors are required to render their verdicts based exclusively on the evidence
presented at the trial and upon the judge’s instructions regarding the law. The legal process will be
corrupted, and the defendant’s rights infringed, if one juror attempts to sway others based on his
or her supposed knowledge of, for example, the relevant law or of the character of certain
witnesses.

The same principle applies in cases where testimony is to given in a language other than English-
speaking jurors have only the interpreted testimony to consider. The official record of the trial
contains only the interpreted testimony. Yet a Spanish-speaking juror (assuming the testimony in
question is given in Spanish) attends to both the original testimony and the interpreted version.
Such a juror may disagree with the interpreter’s rendering of certain testimony. Such a juror may
feel that he or she has detected inflections or nuances in the original testimony that are lost in the
interpretation, even where the interpreter is perfectly competent. And such a juror may of course
be correct (just as given realtor may in fact be more conversant in the relevant property lay than
the presiding judge).

But it is simply not acceptable in our system of law that one or more jurors should be privy to
relevant information not available to all jurors. And it is even less acceptable that such jurors
should be allowed, even in a well-intentioned attempt to be helpful, to sway their felloe jurors
with what amounts to inside information.

In the best of all possible worlds, we would all speak each other’s languages, and interpretation
would not be an issue. On a more practical level, it might, in some jurisdictions, be easier and
fairer to bar English-speaking jurors than to bar Spanish-speaking jurors. But in any case, the
Supreme Court was correct in holding that all the jurors in any given case must hear exactly the
same testimony.

Back off, Ms. Jimenez-Kunstler.