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A prosecutor in Wharton County has accused the elected district attorney of working repeatedly to keep blacks off juries in that rural county southwest of Houston.
In a hearing earlier this month, Assistant District Attorney Nathan Wood told a judge that his boss, District Attorney Ross Kurtz, told him to keep black residents off juries in criminal trials in order to improve the prosecution's chances of winning the case.
"I was not 'instructed' to strike black jurors so much as I was advised or encouraged to do so as a matter of trial strategy," Wood recently told a judge. "Whatever the true intentions behind the statements made in our office, they made me feel uncomfortable."
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that it is illegal for attorneys to consider race when deciding who gets on a jury.
