Commonwealth v. Kelly

1(a). The defendant, a black man convicted of kidnap and rape of a white woman, claims error in the refusal of the trial judge to dismiss the jury venire because only five of the fifty prospective jurors were black. In the absence of any evidence that the ratio of blacks to the venire as a whole was disproportionately smaller than the ratio of blacks to the population as a whole in Suffolk County and that the alleged underrepresentation was due to systematic exclusion, the challenge is without merit. Commonwealth v. Williams, 378 Mass. 217, 221-222 (1979). Commonwealth v. Scanlan, 9 Mass.…