“The right to serve on a jury is as fundamental to the function of democracy as the right to vote. When we head to the polls, we decide who should write our laws. When we participate as a juror, we collectively decide how those laws should apply to justice.”

May 4, 2021 was the start of a bright new chapter in New York’s democracy. Our state enacted legislation that automatically restored the right to vote for New Yorkers returning home from prison. This year, the state legislature has the opportunity to build on that progress by ending the lifetime ban on jury service for people with felony convictions.

Lawmakers must pass the Jury of Our Peers Act. The right to serve on a jury is as fundamental to the function of democracy as the right to vote. When we head to the polls, we decide who should write our laws. When we participate as a juror, we collectively decide how those laws should apply to justice.

However, one of the collateral consequences of decades of over-policing in communities of color and mass incarceration has been the shrinking of our jury pool: There are nearly 1 million New Yorkers who cannot serve on a jury; nearly two-thirds of whom are Black or Latinx. In Manhattan, for example, that means 40 percent of Black men are ineligible to be seated for jury duty—civil or criminal.

In turn, the resulting juries are homogeneous—which leads to less deliberation, less consideration of evidence, and less reflection on bias. Thus, the promise that we will be judged by a jury of our peers remains unfulfilled in New York.