A lawyer for the prosecution came to the rescue of a prisoner on death row on Monday in a dramatic twist to a USA supreme court case described as one of the most egregious cases of courtroom race discrimination seen in decades. For example, prosecutors struck a black juror for being a social worker – but she was a teacher’s aide.
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The Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta alleged prosecutors noted black jurors on their notes from jury selection. First, the judge removes, “for cause”, those jurors deemed incapable of being impartial.
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.
Under a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Batson v. Kentucky, jurors of the defendant’s race can not be rejected from his or her jury due to their race.
Jury selection, in the end, boils down to how prosecution and defense lawyers use their so-called peremptory strikes. He believes the court should rule in favor of Foster and emphasize that trial courts should not accept prosecutors’ implausible explanations for race-based strikes. The video features then-Assistant District Attorney Jack McMahon advising trainees that “young black women are very bad, maybe because they’re downtrodden on two respects… they’re women and they’re blacks”. They also marked those names with a letter “B”, and circled the world “BLACK” on jurors’ completed questionnaires.
“Doesn’t that show pretext?”
The jury pool for Timothy Foster’s 1987 trial included 10 blacks among 95 potential jurors.
As a result, defendants facing trial in cities with large black minorities often face an all-white jury.
At least six of the nine justices indicated during arguments Monday that black people were improperly singled out and kept off the jury. Another failed to make eye contact.
The Supreme Court will determine whether prosecutor Stephen Lanier and his team violated the constitutional rights of Foster. “I hardly – I don’t know them”, Sotomayor said.
“What do we do with the failure of the prosecutor to even ask these black jurors about their concerns?” “They didn’t, of course, take either one of those”.
Bright contends that the state of Georgia continues to change its story about the justifications. Justice Anthony Kennedy said prosecutors wrongly interpreted the Supreme Court’s dictate about racial discrimination.
Eddie Hood Hood was a potential juror in the murder trial of…
Foster was sentenced to death in 1987.
Prosecutors, however, sometimes abuse the system, anti-death penalty activists say.
Garrett, now Marilyn Whitehead, is 63 and still remembers the experience. Foster was 19 at the time of trial, and Garrett was 34.
Foster is black, and his jury was all-white, which is legal.
Peremptory challenges are almost as old as the jury system. And the brief does provide a variety of reasons for each juror who was struck, reasons that the defense argues were not applied to similarly situated white prospective jurors.
Bright replied that historically in Rome prosecutors always had struck black jurors.
No briefs have been filed in support of the state’s position in the case.
But Foster’s appeal rests on the argument that numerous reasons subsequently given by prosecutors do not stand up to close scrutiny and left him with a jury less likely to consider crucial mitigating factors such as alleged learning difficulties when deciding on his sentence. A list of such reasons for each juror can be lengthy because prosecutors cannot fully anticipate just what shape the defense challenge will take, according to prosecutors.
Judges seem to have a high threshold for seeing racial bias, even in supposedly liberal states.
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State courts previously denied Foster’s efforts to revive his case, prompting his appeal to the high court. The Supreme Court appears troubled by the actions of a Georgia prosecutor in disqualifying all the black prospective jurors from the death penalty trial of a black teenager who was accused of killing an elderly white woman. “As much as I would like it to be [otherwise], when you have new evidence, such as in this case – and it is strong evidence – that the court feels like it has to look at, then you are beyond the [relevant legal] bar”. The defendant may also rely on the fact that peremptory challenges constitute a jury selection practice that permits those to discriminate who are of a mind to discriminate.
