In an 1880 case, the Supreme Court struck down a West Virginia law that limited jury service to whites.
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Georgia Deputy Attorney General Beth Burton had little support for the proposition that prosecutor Stephen Lanier advanced plausible “race-neutral” reasons that resulted in an all-white jury for Foster’s trial. To answer that question, the justices must determine whether the Georgia Supreme Court’s decision to reject Foster’s discrimination claim was a decision on the merits of that claim, or whether it was a discretionary decision not to hear it. If it was a merits decision, cert goes to them. In a closing argument, the state prosecutor urged the jury to send a message to “deter other people out there in the projects”. The local housing projects, Bright says, were 90 percent black. Garret was 34, while Foster was 19 at the time.
For instance, Bright pointed to the prosecution’s previous testimony that it struck one potential black juror because she had a cousin who was arrested.
At Timothy Foster’s trial in Rome, Ga., the prosecutor used four of his nine peremptory strikes to knock out all the qualified black jurors in the jury pool. This is a real problem that’s still very much alive today.
Foster v. Chatman has been styled that way because that’s how advocates chip away at the death penalty these days – by showing how it’s unconstitutionally stacked against a few defendants and not others.
The U.S. Supreme Court will be looking into racial prejudice in jury selection Monday, with the justices considering a case of a black teenager who was sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Georgia, The Guardian reports. And because Foster received a death sentence, it could fuel concerns previously voiced by two justices that the death penalty itself may be unconstitutional – in this case because of racial bias. That case hasn’t yet arrived, even though there’s an open invitation to bring one to the table.
“If this court does not find purposeful discrimination on the facts of this case, then it will render Batson meaningless”.
This one is the blatant kind. The names of black jurors were highlighted with a letter “B” next to them.
Paradoxically, the ability to strike a juror has its roots in British law to protect the accused from the Crown. But during the selection process, prosecutors highlighted their names and circled the word “black” on their questionnaires. Jury selection in the Floyd County trial of Timothy Foster began a year later in April 1987.
For decades, scholars who have analyzed death-penalty cases have consistently found racial disparities, with death sentences disproportionately handed down to black men, more often in cases with white victims. On Monday, his lawyer will speak before the Supreme Court to fight for his life, pointing to endemic racism in USA jury selection and the death penalty. One night that August, while intoxicated on a mix of alcohol, marijuana and cocaine, he broke into the home of a 79-year-old retired elementary schoolteacher named Queen Madge White.
The thing with peremptory strikes is that lawyers can use them to challenge potential jurors for nearly any conceivable reason – except a discriminatory reason, like race or gender. It ranked the potential black jurors in order of most desirable to least desirable in case “it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors”. And coming up with those justifications, it turns out, isn’t really hard.
Eddie Hood Hood was a potential juror in the murder trial of…
A study recently conducted in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, showed that black people are three times more likely than whites to be struck out of jury selection. Someone’s appearance as “hostile”. “That goal can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely”.
But the other side is also prone to bullshit. Just like prosecutors have an interest in securing convictions by drawing a jury panel that’s sympathetic to their case, defense lawyers too want jurors who will view their client favorably.
The Supreme Court, in an earlier decision involving a Kentucky burglary case, has prohibited using peremptory challenges to eliminate jurors on the basis of race.
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What makes Foster extraordinary, however, is that the prosecutor does not simply appear to have struck multiple jurors because of their race, the prosecution team also produced a significant written record outlining their strategy to keep African Americans off the jury.
