Supreme Court Overturns La. Murder Case

[Wretched Excess]

Supreme Court Overturns La. Murder Case

The Supreme Court ruled today that a Louisiana prosecutor who secured a death sentence for a black murder defendant improperly excluded African-Americans from the jury in what the prosecutor called his "O.J. Simpson case.''

The court's 7-2 decision will overturn the conviction of Allen Snyder, who has been on death row after being convicted in 1996 of killing his estranged wife's boyfriend and seriously wounding her.

Former Jefferson Parish prosecutor James Williams, whose specialty was convincing juries to sentence murderers to death, compared Snyder's case to Simpson's and reminded jurors during the trial: "He got away with it.''

The court's opinion, written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., did not mention the Simpson remarks, but focused narrowly on whether Williams had improperly excluded blacks from the jury.

While lawyers have great leeway in challenging whether potential jurors are suitable, the court has held in previous cases that race may not be a factor. Alito wrote that, especially in striking one African-American potential juror because the man had expressed concern about the trial schedule, Williams' reasoning, offered to the trial judge was "suspicious.''

"The implausibility of this explanation is reinforced by the prosecutor's acceptance of white jurors who disclosed conflicting obligations that appear to have been at least as serious,'' wrote Alito, a former prosecutor.

During oral arguments in the case, Snyder's lawyer, Stephen B. Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, made much of the juror's exclusion and the trial judge's passivity in accepting the prosecutor's reasoning.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wondered at the time whether the exclusion of blacks from the jury was connected to Williams' remarks about Simpson. "Do you think the prosecutor would have made the analogy if there had been a black juror on the jury?'' he asked the state of Louisiana's lawyer.

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision, and was joined by Justice Antonin Scalia.

Thomas wrote that the trial judge is in the best position to determine whether challenges to specific jurors are legitimate. He criticized his colleagues for second-guessing the trial judge and "paying lip service to the pivotal role of the trial courts.''

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[Chris_]

I guess every jury needs to be 12% black and 12% Hispanic.

[DumbAss Tanker]

I guess every jury needs to be 12% black and 12% Hispanic.

Eh, not really, this is not a new rule however questionable it might be, it goes back to a Supreme Court decision in a case known as Batson and the bottom line is that the Prosecutor isn't allowed to use his preemptory challenges just to get as many minorities off the jury as possible (though the whole purpose of preemptory challenges is that you can kick off ANYONE for any reason or no reason at all, and each side gets a set number of them which varies widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, from one each to lots; each side has unlimited challenges for cause, because obviously there is actually a concrete reason for those).  The Prosecutor in this case basically screwed himself by steering too close to the edge of a rule that any law student would know.