Citing Race Discrimination in Jury Selection, Supreme Court Overturns Death Row Verdict
Feature Story by civilrights.org staff - 6/17/2005
The Supreme Court overturned the conviction of an African-American death row inmate last week, citing race discrimination on the part of the prosecutors during jury selection. For Thomas Miller-El, it was the second time the Court had ruled in his favor and against the appeals court that had heard his case.By a 6-3 vote, the Court held that the lower courts erroneously disregarded evidence that prosecutors in Miller-El's 1986 murder trial had excluded African-American jurors because of their race.
Writing for the majority, Justice David Souter stated that it "blinks reality" to deny that prosecutors struck jurors for race-based reasons.
Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer joined in the majority opinion.
The prosecutor in Miller-El's case had used peremptory strikes (challenges without stated reasons) to remove 10 of the 11 African-American prospective jurors. The only African-American who was allowed to serve on the jury opined that people who committed murder should be slowly tortured to death.
In support of his claim of systematic discrimination, Miller-El offered evidence that for decades, the Dallas County District Attorney's Office had used written discriminatory policies, including a 1963 treatise on jury selection prepared by a top aide to then-Dallas County District Attorney, which warned prosecutors to avoid "Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans, or a member of any minority race [from sitting] on a jury no matter how rich or how well educated," and a treatise written in 1969 but included in all training manuals for prosecutors until at least the early 1980s, which stated that minority jurors were undesirable because they "empathize with the accused."
The Court found this evidence to be persuasive, noting that "the prosecutors' own notes proclaim that the [jury selection] Manual's emphasis on race was on their minds when they considered every potential juror."
Prosecutors had argued that white and African-American prospective jurors had different views on the death penalty and these differing views justified striking the African-American candidates. They also contended that all prospective jurors were questioned in the same way and that any difference in questioning was a result of the venire, members' views on the death penalty and not a result of their race.
The Court rejected these arguments, stating, "The prosecutors' chosen race-neutral reasons for the strikes do not hold up and are so far at odds with the evidence that pretext is the fair conclusion, indicating the very discrimination the explanations were meant to deny."
As he did in 2003 when the Supreme Court issued its 8-1 decision instructing the Fifth Circuit to reconsider its "dismissive and strained interpretation" of the evidence, Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, this time joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Antonin Scalia.
The case is a rare example of an appeals court essentially ignoring a binding Supreme Court majority opinion. In an unusual step, rather than following the Supreme Court's majority analysis, the Fifth Circuit, in dismissing Miller-El's claim of race discrimination, adopted the reasoning of Justice Thomas' earlier dissent, in some places, reproducing parts of the dissent verbatim.
