Oral argument in the case will be heard tomorrow. More on Snyder v. Louisiana (06-10119) -- including links to the brief, via SCOTUS Wiki.
In the Los Angeles Times, Henry Weinstein has a preview, "Jury under justices' scrutiny."
Jim Williams had a reputation as a highly skilled, tenacious prosecutor -- maybe even a little bloodthirsty.
After scoring convictions in dozens of murder cases, he told a reporter: "It got to the point where there was no thrill for me unless there was a chance for the death penalty."
In the mid-'90s, Williams posed for Esquire magazine standing behind a miniature electric chair with mug shots of five African American men he sent to death row. Since then, two of the defendants have been exonerated, two had their sentences commuted to life because of misconduct by Williams, and the fifth won a retrial after an appeals court overturned the verdict.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is to review another case in which Williams obtained a death sentence against a black man. The key question is whether Williams violated Allen Snyder's constitutional rights by removing all the potential black jurors at the start of his 1996 trial.
The Supreme Court's decision is expected to affect not only whether death-row inmate Snyder lives or dies but also how courts around the country weigh claims of unlawful racial discrimination during jury selection.
At the end of the trial, Williams exhorted the all-white jury to give Snyder a death sentence because the case was "very, very similar" to the "most famous murder case" just a year earlier, in which former football star O.J. Simpson "got away with it."
Williams declined to be interviewed for this story.
As long ago as 1879, the Supreme Court said it was impermissible to arbitrarily exclude jurors because of their race. But putting teeth into such rulings has proved difficult.
In 2005, the Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction of a black man in Contra Costa County who was tried by an all-white jury, concluding that the California Supreme Court set too high a standard for when a trial judge should question a prosecutor's explanation for removing jurors.
In U.S. courts, attorneys are allowed to remove potential jurors in two ways. The first is called a challenge for cause, where the lawyer has to offer a specific reason for removal, such as when a juror is married to a police officer in a case involving an officer.
The second is called a peremptory strike, where lawyers are permitted to remove a juror based simply on a hunch or intuition. States generally limit the number of peremptory strikes -- in a capital-murder trial in Louisiana, the limit is 12.
In the last 40 years, the Supreme Court has issued four major decisions aimed at limiting the ability of prosecutors to use peremptory strikes to exclude someone from a jury who is the same race as the defendant. Over time, the court has attempted to tighten the process, acknowledging that the problem continued despite its prior rulings.
In 2005, Justice David H. Souter, writing for the majority in a ruling that overturned a death sentence in Texas, felt compelled to observe that "the very integrity of the courts is jeopardized" when there is racial bias in jury selection.
AP has, "High court to hear Louisiana capital case," view the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Lawyers for Snyder said the state illegally struck all five qualified black members from the jury pool using preemptory challenges, or challenges for which a reason does not have to be given.
Under a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, attorneys are not allowed to exclude people from a jury solely because of their race.
"It really is scandalous in this day and age to think of a black man being executed after a conviction in which black jurors were deliberately excluded from the process," said Richard Bourke, director of the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center.
In a 4-3 decision, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that race had no part in the state's decisions involving black potential jurors. Dissenting justices challenged that, saying comparisons were made by a prosecutor between Snyder's case and that of O.J. Simpson, who had been acquitted in 1995 of killing his ex-wife and a friend of hers.
The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the state court to take another look at the case, following a decision that overturned a black Texas man's murder conviction and death sentence because prosecutors struck nearly all blacks from the jury.
However, after reviewing the case, the Louisiana high court did not change its ruling, leading to the U.S. Supreme Court appeal.
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