The US supreme court has agreed to review a case in which a Georgia prosecutor is accused of striking out all prospective black jurors from a 1987 capital trial involving a black defendant and a white victim.
Forty-two prospective jurors were available, four of whom were black – and all four were removed by the prosecution during jury selection.
“We are pleased that the Court is going to review the case”, said attorney Stephen B Bright, with the Southern Center for Human Rights. “There was clearly discrimination in striking African Americas from the jury.”
The prosecution gave “race-neutral” reasons for excluding the jurors, according to the petition, but when the defendant obtained the prosecutor’s notes during the proceedings, the word “black” had been circled next to the “race” question on each questionnaire.
An investigator for the prosecution team also ranked the black potential jurors against each other in case “it comes down to having to pick” one of them, the petition states.
The defendant, Timothy Foster, was sentenced to death by the all-white jury for the murder of Queen White, an elderly retired schoolteacher.
In the penalty phase of the trial, when the jury was tasked with deciding whether to sentence Foster to death, the prosecution argued that execution would “deter other people out there in the projects”.
His lawyers have been appealing for probable cause for a retrial since his sentencing, but it was only after 10 years of denied motions that the prosecution’s jury selection notes were finally released – following a request under Georgia’s open records act, the state-level equivalent of a freedom of information request.
A Georgia court did not find that the law had been violated by the prosecution’s striking-off of the black jurors – but the supreme court will now review that decision.
