Jury Selection in Dallas County
Source: "A State of Denial: Texas Justice and the Death Penalty,"
Texas Defender Service

"If you ever put another nigger on the jury, you're fired".

	--Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade
	reprimanding Assistant District Attorney 
	Hampton for seating a black man on a jury.

The U.S. Supreme Court twice found Dallas County's method of selecting
jury pools unconstitutional, forcing the county to include minorities in
the venire [the entire panel from which the jury is drawn].  In response,
Dallas County, under the direction of the legendary Henry Wade, developed
a system of training prosecutors to excuse minorities, women, Jews, and
the physically challenged from criminal juries. In 1963, Bill Alexander,
one of Henry Wade's top aides, wrote a treatise on jury selection in
criminal cases. That treatise instructed prosecutors as follows: "Do not
take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans or a member of any minority race on a
jury, no matter how rich or how well educated."

Soon after the Alexander memo was written, then-Assistant District
Attorney Jon Sparling wrote the now-infamous Sparling memorandum, entitled
"Jury Selection in a Criminal Case." This memo advised prosecutors to
exclude from juries "any member of a minorty group which may subject him
to oppression - they almost always empathize with the accused."

Sparling instructed prosecutors to avoid women ("I don't like women jurors
because I can't trust them"); Jews ("Jewish veniremen generally make poor
State's jurors...Jews have a history of oppression and generally empathize
with the accused") and the physically challenged ("Look for physical
afflictions...These people usually sympathize with the accused.")