SCOTUS to Consider Racial Bias in Selecting Jurors

Nearly everyone in the public housing apartments near the scene of the killing of a 79-year-old woman in Rome, Georgia, was black, as was defendant Timothy Tyrone Foster. Consequently, much of the debate Monday centered on procedural issues, namely “whether the Georgia Supreme Court’s decision to reject Foster’s discrimination claim was a decision on the merits of that claim, or whether it was a discretionary decision not to hear it”, BuzzFeed reports. So was the victim. “Foster’s new evidence”, they write in their brief, “is perfectly consistent with conscientious, non-discriminatory prosecutors preparing to rebut a defense challenge to the array of the jury and a pretrial Batson challenge to any black prospective juror that may be peremptorily struck”. In the list of possible jurors, titled “definite no’s” the top five people are black. A ruling in favor of Foster could give him a new trial, and defense lawyers would argue he should not be sentenced to death.

The only issue before the justices on Monday deals with the way this particular jury was put together. The reality is that, most often, complaints about the use of race in composing a jury are made by defense lawyers against prosecutors in cases in which the accused is a minority.

“They insisted that the Church of Christ took a strong position against the death penalty and that any member of the Church of Christ would vote against the death penalty”, Bright says.

White had the misfortune to use her bathroom in the middle of the night. Only when she returned to her bedroom and turned on the lamp beside her bed did she notice Foster in her living room, according to Foster’s confession to police.

“All the evidence suggests a kind of singling out”, Kagan said.

A psychiatrist also testified at trial that Foster was “in the borderline range for intellectual disability”, his IQ scores ranging from just 58 to 80 throughout his life.

A Georgia death-row inmate convicted of murder when he was a teenager is about to get a potentially life-saving chance to challenge how his jury was formed. But Supreme Court cases decided after Batson already have significantly watered down its meaning.

What makes Foster extraordinary, however, is that the prosecutor does not simply appear to have struck multiple jurors because of their race, the prosecution team also produced a significant written record outlining their strategy to keep African Americans off the jury.

The name of each black prospective juror was highlighted in green, circled and labeled with a “B”.

Georgia’s deputy attorney general, Beth A. Burton, will be defending how the trial prosecutors weeded out unwanted jurors.

A group of former prosecutors, including former Los Angels County District Attorney Gil Garcetti and author Scott Turow, argue in a friend of the court brief that “if this Court does not find purposeful discrimination on the facts of this case, then it will render Batson meaningless”.

Eddie Hood was “B#1” in the prosecutors’ notes.

He said Lanier had no reason to fear he’d go soft on Foster.

Foster could win a new trial if the Supreme Court rules his way.

All of this flowed out of the Court’s Friday letter, wondering which state court decision Foster’s lawyer should have appealed, and what the difference between the two, if there were any, meant to the Court’s review.

One of the black women on the list was considered acceptable by prosecutors for a time, but then she, too, was struck, for reasons that several Justices reacted to skeptically. In 2010, the Equal Justice Initiative found that in a few Alabama counties, more than 75 percent of black jury pool members in death penalty cases had been struck by prosecutors.

Eventually, the jury pool in Foster’s case was narrowed to include four African-American.

The persistent question in such cases is whether African Americans are being systematically excluded from jury service because of their race, or whether other legitimate factors are leading to their consistent exclusion. Those are called peremptory strikes, and they have been the focus of the complaints about discrimination. Under the Batson rules, if the defense could show a racial pattern in prosecution peremptory strikes, the prosecutor would have to justify each one by demonstrating a nonracial reason for eliminating the juror. “Moreover, my own experience suggests that discrimination in jury selection is indeed a national problem, despite over a century of attempted legislative and judicial remedies”.