{"id":4348,"date":"2015-11-03T09:00:44","date_gmt":"2015-11-03T17:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/supreme-court-troubled-by-das-rejection-of-black-jurors\/"},"modified":"2015-11-03T09:00:44","modified_gmt":"2015-11-03T17:00:44","slug":"supreme-court-troubled-by-das-rejection-of-black-jurors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/supreme-court-troubled-by-das-rejection-of-black-jurors\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court troubled by DA’s rejection of black jurors"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON<\/strong> \u2014 The Supreme Court signaled support Monday for a black death row inmate in Georgia who claims prosecutors improperly kept African-Americans off the jury that convicted him of killing a white woman.<\/p>\n

Justice Stephen Breyer likened the chief prosecutor to his excuse-filled grandson. Justice Elena Kagan said the case seemed as clear a violation \u201cas a court is ever going to see\u201d of rules the Supreme Court laid out in 1986 to prevent racial discrimination in the selection of juries.<\/p>\n

At least six of the nine justices indicated during arguments that black people were improperly singled out and kept off the jury that eventually sentenced defendant Timothy Tyrone Foster to death in 1987.<\/p>\n

Foster could win a new trial if the Supreme Court rules his way. The discussion Monday also suggested that a technical issue might prevent the justices from deciding the substance of Foster\u2019s case.<\/p>\n

Georgia Deputy Attorney General Beth Burton had little support on the court for the proposition that prosecutor Stephen Lanier advanced plausible \u201crace-neutral\u201d reasons that resulted in an all-white jury for Foster\u2019s trial. Foster was convicted of killing 79-year-old Queen Madge White in her home in Rome, Georgia.<\/p>\n

Several justices noted that Lanier\u2019s reasons for excusing people from the jury changed over time, including the arrest of the cousin of one black juror. The record in the case indicates that Lanier learned of the arrest only after the jury had been seated. \u201cThat seems an out and out false statement,\u201d Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said.<\/p>\n

Breyer drew an analogy with a grandson who was looking for any reason not to do his homework, none of them especially convincing.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd so I would say my answer to my grandchild is, \u2018Look, you\u2019re not too tired to do your homework,\u2019\u201d Breyer said.<\/p>\n

With Lanier, he said, \u201cI think any reasonable person looking at this would say no, his reason was a purpose to discriminate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Justice Samuel Alito, who typically sides with prosecutors in criminal cases, was bothered by Lanier\u2019s explanation that the same juror whose cousin was arrested also was not chosen because she was close in age to Foster. \u201cShe was in her 30s. He was 18 or 19,\u201d Alito dryly said.<\/p>\n

The discussion of the juror\u2019s cousin also prompted Justice Sonia Sotomayor to say that Lanier never established whether the juror even was close to her cousin.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have cousins who I know have been arrested, but I have no idea where they\u2019re in jail. I hardly — I don\u2019t know them,\u201d Sotomayor said.<\/p>\n

Georgia courts have consistently rejected Foster\u2019s claims of discrimination, even after his lawyers obtained the prosecution\u2019s notes that revealed prosecutors\u2019 focus on the black people in the jury pool. In one example, a handwritten note headed \u201cDefinite No\u2019s\u201d listed six people, of whom five were the remaining black prospective jurors.<\/p>\n

The sixth person on the list was a white woman who made clear she would never impose the death penalty, Foster\u2019s lawyer, Stephen Bright said Monday. \u201cEven she ranked behind the black jurors,\u201d Bright said.<\/p>\n

Burton tried to persuade the justices that the notes focused on black people in the jury pool because prosecutors were preparing to defend against discrimination claims. Burton said the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling about race discrimination in jury selection was about a year old when Foster\u2019s case went to trial. The 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky set up a system by which trial judges could evaluate claims of discrimination and the race-neutral explanations by prosecutors.<\/p>\n

Foster\u2019s trial lawyers did not so much contest his guilt as try to explain it as a product of a troubled childhood, drug abuse and mental illness. They also raised their objections about the exclusion of African-Americans from the jury. On that point, the judge accepted Lanier\u2019s explanations that factors other than race drove his decisions. The jury convicted Foster and sentenced him to death.<\/p>\n

The jury issue was revived 19 years later, in 2006, when the state turned over the prosecution\u2019s notes in response to a request under Georgia\u2019s Open Records Act.<\/p>\n

The name of each potential black juror was highlighted on four different copies of the jury list and the word \u201cblack\u201d was circled next to the race question on questionnaires for the black prospective jurors. Three of the prospective black jurors were identified in notes as \u201cB#1,\u201d \u2018\u2019B#2,\u201d and \u201cB#3.\u201d<\/p>\n

An investigator working for the prosecutors also ranked the black prospective jurors against each other in case if \u201cit comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, Georgia courts were not persuaded.<\/p>\n

The argument featured no discussion of limiting the discretionary, or peremptory, decisions to reject potential jurors. Justice Thurgood Marshall warned in the 1986 Batson case that racial discrimination would persist until those discretionary jury strikes were eliminated.<\/p>\n

A decision in the case, Foster v. Chatman, 14-8349, is expected by late spring.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Follow Mark Sherman on Twitter at: http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/shermancourt<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 The Supreme Court signaled support Monday for a black death row inmate in Georgia who claims prosecutors improperly kept African-Americans off the jury that convicted him of killing a white woman. Justice Stephen Breyer likened the chief prosecutor to his excuse-filled grandson. Justice Elena Kagan said the case seemed as clear a violation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-4348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4348"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=4348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}