WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court declined on Tuesday to hear a case about jury selection that advocates hoped would prevent prosecutors and defense attorneys from keeping people off juries solely because of their race and gender.
The court rejected a request to review whether a Georgia prosecutor improperly struck Black and female jurors from a panel that convicted and sentenced to death a Black man for murdering a white woman during a robbery attempt.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have reversed a lower court's decision that found no error.
In a dissent joined by Sotomayor, Jackson wrote that the Georgia Supreme Court "ignored highly salient facts about the prosecutor's admittedly discriminatory strike behavior and antipathy toward the legal standards that address such conduct."
"Instead, the state court made a narrow assessment of the prosecutor's strikes that lacked important context," Jackson wrote.
Anna Arceneaux, one of the attorneys for Warren King, the convicted man, said the Supreme Court should have stepped up to enforce a core constitutional principle.
“Discrimination based on race and gender must have no role in our criminal legal system and certainly not when a man’s life is at stake," Arceneaux said in a statement.
His attorneys said the prosecutor used false or inconsistent reasons for rejecting potential jurors when striking nearly all of the Black people and few of the white, all women. When challenged, the prosecutor railed against a 1986 Supreme Court decision, Batson v. Kentucky, that said a juror can’t be dismissed solely based on race.
King’s attorneys called it “the unusual case in which the record shows express evidence of discrimination.”
Georgia’s attorney general countered that a “fair review of the record” shows race was not the reason for the jurors’ dismissal.
The Georgia Supreme Court sided with the prosecutor and a divided panel on the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision.
But the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said courts are providing only a cursory check on whether the landmark 1986 ruling is being followed.
“Georgia prosecutors have routinely used peremptory strikes in a constitutionally suspect manner, including by striking all qualified black persons or by striking only qualified black persons,” they told the Supreme Court.
Stephen Bright, an expert on racial discrimination in jury selection, recently wrote that most studies on jury selection show prosecutors disproportionately use their strikes to exclude Black jurors.
“Black citizens are often completely or substantially underrepresented on juries, especially in death penalty cases,” Bright wrote in an opinion piece for The Washington Post.
Bright said the Supreme Court had the chance to “send a message to prosecutors across the country that this abhorrent practice is unacceptable.”
King, then 18, was arrested in 1994 for the murder of Karen Crosby, a convenience store clerk. King’s cousin, Walter Smith, was also arrested.
Both King and Smith blamed each other for shooting Crosby.
Through a plea agreement, Smith testified against King and was sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole.
Patricia McTier, one of the Black women struck from King’s jury, recently wrote that she was surprised to later learn the prosecutor claimed she would be biased because a relative of her husband had been charged with aggravated assault. McTier said she’d known nothing about her husband’s distant cousin and hadn’t been asked about it during jury selection.
McTier wrote in an opinion piece for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she’s “deeply troubled” King is facing execution “following a trial marked by such blatant racial discrimination.”
“I can’t know what verdict I would have reached in the case,” she wrote, “but I do know that justice was not served by the prosecutor’s efforts to remove Black people from the jury.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Were jurors dismissed because they were Black? Supreme Court won't review.
