During jury selection, all four black members of the pool of potential jurors were “struck” by prosecutors, meaning they were removed from consideration.
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Twenty years after Foster’s conviction, his attorneys obtained notes from prosecutors that detailed their efforts to keep African Americans from the jury.
The Floyd County DA’s Office had no comment since it’s a pending case but did say it was meeting with the victim’s family to explain the decision to them. The court’s 7-1 ruling found that prosecutors violated the Constitution by deliberately excluding African-Americans from the jury.
In his view, “The Court today invites state prisoners to go searching for new “evidence” by demanding the files of the prosecutors who long ago convicted them….I can not go along with that ‘sort of sandbagging of state courts.’ New evidence should not justify the relitigation of Batson claims”, Thomas wrote. “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”.
The U.S. Supreme Court considered the new evidence and the question of whether the potential jurors had been kept off the jury because of race. The only thing that likely distinguishes this from many other similar cases of racial bias in jury selection is the existence of some shockingly explicit prosecutorial notes.
The ruling stated that the court did nothing to limit peremptory strikes, lawyers’ ability to reject potential jurors without offering any reason.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the court’s majority, wrote that prosecution notes introduced into evidence “plainly belie the state’s claim that it exercised its strikes (removing a potential juror) in a “colour blind” manner”. “Usually courts ignore patterns of race discrimination and accept false reasons for the strikes”, Foster’s lead attorney Stephen Bright of the Southern Center of Human Rights said.
Foster was convicted and sentenced to death. The chief justice then calls out, with respect to two black jurors, the prosecution’s “shifting explanations, the misrepresentations of the record, and the persistent focus on race in [their] file”.
The notes revealed that the prosecutors ranked the black potential jurors against one another and included all of them as the first names on their list of “Definite NOs” – potential jurors who would definitely be struck.
The decision, which comes 30 years after Foster’s death penalty conviction for murder, highlights the continuing effects of racism on jury selection.
Indeed, Thomas appears much more concerned with the extra work Foster is going to create for himself and his fellow justices than with the fact that a man was going to be executed unconstitutionally.
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Justice Clarence Thomas, the only justice of color, was the lone dissenter in Foster v. Chatman ruling. Instead, Foster’s case may be the most blatant example of racist jury selection that has ever come before the Supreme Court. On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor that he should be allowed a new trial.
