Court’s Term Marked by Blows to Race Bias : Justices OK Affirmative Action, Ease Challenges to Discrimination in Voting, Pay, Jury Selection

The Supreme Court is nearing the end of a term that has provided substantial new legal strength to efforts to curb race bias in the workplace, the electoral process and the criminal justice system.

The justices, set to adjourn early next week, gave a green light Wednesday to minority job preference plans and earlier eased the way for minorities to challenge laws that dilute their voting strength, to combat pay disparities rooted in discrimination and to prevent bias in jury selection.

“We looked at this term as perhaps the most important in 15 years for race cases,” Barry L. Goldstein, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said Thursday. “It’s turned out to be an extraordinarily good one.”

Administration Rebuffed

Civil rights lawyers say that those decisions carry added significance because they repeatedly rejected efforts by the Reagan Administration to limit legal protection for minorities.

“The court roundly rejected the invitation to become a negative force in civil rights,” said William L. Robinson of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “That ought to send a message that the Supreme Court is not going to turn its back on claims of race discrimination.”

In its affirmative action rulings Wednesday, the court said that hiring and promotion goals or quotas are permissible remedies for past discrimination and that special job preferences may be given to minority members who cannot prove that they personally were victims of discrimination.

The justices rejected the Administration’s contention that such preferences must be limited to actual victims of discrimination and that hiring and promotion quotas should be banned.

The effect of the two decisions was to dispel doubt about the legality of affirmative action that arose after a 1984 ruling overturning a court order that required the city of Memphis, Tenn., to lay off white firefighters to preserve the jobs of blacks with less seniority.

Wednesday’s rulings indicated that carefully crafted plans that did not directly cause whites to lose their jobs were permissible--and that limited and flexible goals or quotas could be employed to remedy past discrimination.

Earlier in the week, the court made two other rulings that drew wide acclaim from civil rights forces.

The justices unanimously opened the way for court challenges to pay disparities between whites and blacks that can be traced to race-based salary scales existing before federal laws barring such discrimination went into effect. The court said that employers must correct the “lingering effects” of pay discrimination--and may be sued if they do not.

Districting Decision

The court, in its first interpretation of new amendments to the Voting Rights Act, said that legislative districting plans that effectively reduce the electoral strength of minorities may be found discriminatory--whether or not discrimination was intended. Vote dilution occurs when boundaries are drawn so that minority-member candidates are usually defeated by whites.

The justices rebuffed the Administration’s contention that the absence of discrimination can be proved if black candidates are occasionally elected from a contested district. Although the decision was not seen as guaranteeing “proportional representation” for minorities, it will make it easier for them to challenge election laws that weaken their voting power.

Earlier in the term, the court made three rulings aimed at curbing bias in the selection of trial juries and grand juries.

In overturning a 21-year-old ruling, the justices held that prosecutors may not remove prospective jurors simply because they belong to the same race as the defendant.

Challenges Limited

The court sharply limited the widespread practice in which prosecutors use peremptory challenges--for which no reason must be stated--to exclude from juries persons who they believe may be partial to the defendant.

The justices rejected pleas from law enforcement authorities, supported by the Reagan Administration, to leave intact the wide discretion that prosecutors have long enjoyed in exercising such challenges.

The court said that, if juror exclusions are challenged by the defense, the prosecution must meet a heavy burden of proving that their removal was not based on race.

In another decision, the court held that a defendant facing the death penalty in an interracial murder must be permitted to question prospective jurors about their views on race.

Grand Jury Ruling

And, in a third ruling, the justices, acting in a 24-year-old California murder case, said that a criminal conviction must be overturned if members of the defendant’s race were purposely excluded from the grand jury that indicted him. The court rejected the state’s contention that an exception should be made when there was overwhelming evidence of guilt and no showing that the trial itself was unfair.

Burt Neuborne, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the three cases “continue the strong trend in recent years of aggressively striking down all vestiges of racism in the criminal justice system.”