The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a Georgia man sentenced to death is entitled to a new trial because prosecutors deliberately excluded all African Americans from the jury based on their race. With the Supreme Court win, Foster’s conviction is not vacated but he will be able to seek a new trial. In those notes, all blacks in the pool of prospective jurors had their names highlighted in green and marked with the letter “B”.
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“The focus on race in the prosecution’s file plainly demonstrates a concerted effort to keep black prospective jurors off the jury”.
But the court’s majority said that the state’s argument “reeks of afterthought”, noting it had never been raised before in the case’s 30-year history.
Rarely do the prosecution’s notes come to light as they did in his case, making clear the discriminatory intent. “So it reversed the Georgia court’s finding that there was no race discrimination in this case”.
A recent study by the anti-death-penalty group Reprieve Australia showed that prosecutors in Caddo Parish, La., struck would-be jurors who were black three times as often as others.
The decision did nothing, however, to limit peremptory strikes, lawyers’ ability to reject potential jurors without offering any reason. Lawyers can use a set number of strikes when selecting a jury to bar or remove potential members without giving a reason.
The justices ruled in favor of Georgia death row inmate Timothy Foster by a vote of 7-1, with Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s only African American member, dissenting. Foster was later indicted for sexually assaulting and strangling the 79-year old widow.
Foster’s claims were rejected by a trial court and the Georgia Supreme Court.
After Foster was convicted, Stephen Lanier, the lead prosecutor, urged the all-white jury to impose a death sentence to “deter other people out there in the projects”. Even that woman ranked behind the black jurors, Bright said.
“Foster’s new evidence does not justify this court’s reassessment of who was telling the truth almost three decades removed from voir dire”, Mr Thomas wrote.
The Supreme Court just made a major statement with regard to how juries are picked in this country.
Indeed, studies have shown that exclusion of black citizens from juries is still a problem. Prosecutors are on notice that incriminating notations during jury selection are a very bad idea.
Prosecutors believe that all-white juries are more likely to convict and harshly sentence black defendants than racially diverse juries. The State’s High Court will decide if there was race discrimination in the jury section process.
Roberts didn’t buy the prosecutors’ rationale for ejecting two black jurors in particular, and he methodically ripped holes in their arguments before sending the case back to the lower courts for further proceedings.
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An attorney asked the Mississippi Supreme Court on Tuesday to toss out a death sentence for a man who has spent more than half his life on death row, saying he’s mentally disabled and should not be executed for killing a family of four a quarter-century ago.
