St. Louis CofCC Blog

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Sup. Ct. overturns La. murder conviction

The Supreme Court sent a message to prosecutors and judges Wednesday that it will cast a skeptical eye on the exclusion of blacks from juries.

The justices, by a 7-2 vote, threw out a death sentence and murder conviction because a Louisiana prosecutor kept blacks off the jury in a trial he called his “O.J. Simpson case.”

While the high court has ruled previously that jurors cannot be excused solely because of their race, the practice has continued, often with the approval of judges, legal scholars said.

“Courts have consistently been willing to accept any explanation, however farfetched, as to why the exclusion of a minority juror wasn’t actually based on race,” Hofstra University law professor Eric M. Freedman said.

The court’s ruling Wednesday indicates judges should be less accepting of prosecutors’ explanations, Freedman said.

The justices said state prosecutor Jim Williams improperly excluded blacks from the jury that convicted Allen Snyder of killing his estranged wife’s companion. Snyder is black and the jurors were white.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said the trial judge should have blocked Williams from barring a black juror. Alito’s opinion made no mention of Simpson.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia dissented. Thomas said he would not “second-guess” the judge.

This is a huge shot across the bough for prosecutors and juror selection.  This ruling, combined with the Federal prohibition on prosecutorial preemptive dismissals of potential jurors who are the same race as the defendant, virtually guarantees that non-white criminal defendants will have at least one of their racial brethren on the jury.  Nullification, anyone?

This decision also means that SCOTUS thinks that white people are too stupid and bigoted to judge black defendants, and that SCOTUS is able to read the minds of prosecutors.

It won’t be that much longer until the legitimate justice system will be able to get a conviction against any black criminal defendant in a jurisdiction that has a significant black population, e.g. most major cities.  The juries won’t convict them, so there’s no reason for the defendants to take a plea deal.