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Georgia Man Gets Death Penalty Case Tossed 30 Years Later
The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned a death sentence imposed on an African-American prison inmate by an all-white jury, after finding that state prosecutors improperly kept blacks off the jury.
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The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Timothy Tyrone Foster, convicted in 1987 of murdering Queen White, a 79-year-old retired schoolteacher.
The United States Supreme Court has overturned a murder conviction after nearly 30 years, saying the selection of an all-white jury to try the case was unlawful.
Long after his trial, Foster obtained previously withheld prosecutors’ notes, in which the prosecution wrote the letter “B” next to the names of prospective black jurors and circled the word “black” on questionnaires.
Foster’s lawyer told the court that the prosecutors drew up a list of six prospective jurors to be stricken from the panel: five were black, and one was opposed to the death penalty. “Even after the undeniable evidence of discrimination was presented in this case, the Georgia courts ignored it and upheld Foster’s conviction and death sentence”.
“It was the trial court that observed the [jury selection] firsthand and heard them answer the prosecution’s questions, and its evaluation of the prosecution’s credibility on this point is certainly far better than this court’s almost 30 years later”, Thomas wrote.
The high court returned Foster’s case to state court, but Stephen Bright, Foster’s Atlanta-based lawyer, said “there is no doubt” that the decision Monday means Foster is entitled to a new trial, 29 years after he was sentenced to death for killing a white woman.
“The focus on race in the prosecution’s file plainly demonstrates a concerted effort to keep black prospective jurors off the jury”, Roberts wrote.
Roberts has not always been receptive to claims of race discrimination, but this is a strong and sweeping condemnation of the conduct of the Georgia prosecutors in this case, whose attempts to argue that these strikes were not motivated by race he finds totally implausible.
The prosecution gave reasons for excluding potential black jurors including that they “did not make enough eye contact” during questioning and were “bewildered”, “hostile”, “defensive”, “nervous” and “impudent”. “The exclusion of black citizens from jury service results in juries that do not represent their communities and undermines the credibility and legitimacy of the criminal justice system”.
Foster, a black man from Georgia, is now 48, and has been on death row ever since. But three out of four divorced white prospective jurors were allowed to serve, as were eight white jurors under the age of 36.
Foster’s lawyer said that discrimination would not have been as apparent without the prosecutor’s own files.
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The case is Foster v. Chatman.