For more than 30 years, Dallas County jury selection has been a matter of national importance. The series of articles that begins today represents our best effort to bring that story up to date.

The Dallas County district attorney's office became notorious in 1973, after disclosures that prosecutors were using a manual advising them to eliminate minorities from juries.

In 1986, The Dallas Morning News reported that prosecutors continued to bar almost all blacks from juries. Within weeks, Justice Thurgood Marshall referred to our study and cited the office as an example of continuing discrimination against blacks in jury selection.

In 2003, the Supreme Court declared that the district attorney's office had been "suffused with bias" against blacks, and told lower courts to reconsider the 1986 capital murder conviction of Thomas Joe Miller-El.

The Supreme Court's stinging rebuke of local prosecutors prompted us to ask how things had changed in Dallas County in the 17 years since Mr. Miller-El's conviction.

It took two years to research the question in depth.

Gaining access to the court records required an order from each of Dallas County's 15 felony court judges. District Attorney Bill Hill opposed our requests, arguing that the information should remain secret to protect jurors' privacy.

Over many months, one judge after another ruled for openness.

"For decades, minority citizens, who have equally feared and laughed at jury service, have stayed away from our courthouse under the assumptions that they would be struck because of their race," state District Judge John Creuzot wrote as he became the first judge to grant us access to records in his court. "The right of all citizens of Dallas County, and especially minority citizens, to know if past discriminatory practices in jury selection ... have been erased clearly outweigh[s] the protections of confidentiality."

The district attorney's office appealed Judge Creuzot's decision to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, and lost.

Having obtained the information, we wanted to find the fairest ways of looking at it. That took months of close collaboration among our own statistical experts and criminologists, sociologists and statisticians at universities across the country.

We settled on a series of analyses aimed at comparing what prosecutors and defense lawyers did with what they said they had done.

Statistics, however, can never tell the whole story. So we interviewed jurors, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, jury consultants and scholars.

The result is a story of black and white, with many shades of gray. Telling that story fairly and completely will require several pages over the next three days. That's a big investment for us, and for our readers.

But no constitutional guarantee is more fundamental than the right to a fair trial, and nowhere has that been more controversial than in Dallas County. We believe this series does the topic justice.

George Rodrigue is managing editor of The Dallas Morning News.