In a ruling Vox says “could have a big impact on racism in the justice system”, the Supreme Court on Tuesday tossed a death sentence rendered nearly 30 years ago against a Georgia black man, voting 7-1 that state prosecutors kept African Americans off the jury that convicted him, the AP reports.
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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”. Years after that trial, Foster’s attorneys obtained (via the state’s open records laws) documents revealing the prosecution’s internal deliberations – including much of the evidence described above suggesting intentionally race discrimination. The prosecutor’s office in this Georgia death penalty case struck every single black member of the jury pool.
Elsewhere, prospective black jurors were identified as B#1, B#2, etc, while the prosecution had a note that said “if it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors, [this one] might be okay”.
According to CNN.com, Foster’s lawyers have reportedly obtained notes written by the prosecution during their jury selection process. The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard arguments in November.
“The sheer number of references to race in that file is arresting”, he wrote. Foster argued that the state’s strikes were racially motivated.
A prosecutor’s handwritten notes that labeled prospective jurors with terms like “blk wino” and “blk, high drug neighborhood”. The 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky set up a system by which trial judges could evaluate claims of discrimination and the explanations by prosecutors that their actions were not based on race.
But on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that will be hard for those Americans to digest. Foster, who was 18 at the time of the murder, to death after prosecutors urged it to “deter other people out there in the projects”.
A note attached to a black juror’s questionnaire showing he was accepted because he attended a “multiracial” church, rather than a black one, and went to “predominantly white schools”.
In fact, the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys presented a statewide training course in 1995 that included a handout called “Batson justifications: Articulating Juror Negatives”, listing 10 kinds of “justifications” that can be offered as a race-neutral explanation for a juror strike.
Stephen Bright, who founded the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta four decades ago, has now won all three of the cases he’s argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In other words, this was so nakedly About Race, although nothing ever is About Race, and the prosecutorial misconduct so egregious, that it revolted even Chief Justice John Roberts, the man who never misses a chance to declare the Day Of Jubilee. “Foster’s new evidence does not justify this court’s reassessment of who was telling the truth almost three decades removed from voir dire”, Thomas wrote, referencing a jury selection term.
Under Florida’s new law, juries will have to unanimously determine “the existence of at least one aggravating factor” before defendants can be eligible for death sentences. A 2012 Duke University study of non-capital cases found that all-white juries convict black defendants 16 percent more often than white defendants. But in the end, the eight-member court ruled 7-1 that Georgia prosecutors had unconstitutionally rejected jurors from Foster’s trial based on their race.
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Before we go on, it’s important to remember that Justice Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall, the legal titan who first brought down separate-but-equal and who drove a stake through the heart of Plessy v. Ferguson.
