"Federal appeals court orders new trial for black suspect," is the title of Steve McGonigle's report in today's Dallas Morning News.
Dallas County's long history of racial discrimination in jury selection added a chapter from a new era this week.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered a new trial for Cecil Keith Hayes, a black man from Mesquite who was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 70 years in prison by a nearly all-white Dallas jury in 2002.
A three-judge panel concluded that prosecutors illegally struck two qualified black prospective jurors during jury selection and then tried to disguise their intentions to seat an all-white jury.
Unlike previous court findings of jury discrimination in Dallas County, Tuesday's ruling focuses on a case decided almost two decades after a landmark Supreme Court decision that prohibited biased practices.
In the Hayes case, prosecutors initially struck all eight black prospective jurors. One was impaneled after the trial judge rejected the prosecutor's explanation that the woman had been sleeping in court and was "too grandmotherly."
The trial judge accepted explanations that another black juror appeared "hostile" during questioning and that a second one gave inconsistent answers about whether she would require the state to produce the firearm allegedly used in the crime.
The appeals court deemed those explanations not credible, and it criticized the trial judge, Thomas Thorpe, for accepting the prosecutor's statements.
"Hayes has shown that the state's reasons for striking ... were implausible or invalid, and therefore were pretexts for discrimination," stated the decision written by Judge Catharina Haynes, a former civil court judge in Dallas.
And:
The decision marked the second time in 13 months that the appeals court has overturned a case from Dallas County because of jury discrimination. Last January, the court reversed the 1979 death penalty conviction of Jonathan Bruce Reed.
Those rulings followed a 2005 Supreme Court decision that reversed a Dallas County conviction from 1986 because of overt racial discrimination by prosecutors.
Both cases were reversed for violating the Supreme Court's ban on jury discrimination expressed in a 1986 decision, Batson vs. Kentucky. A concurring opinion cited an investigation of jury selection by The News as evidence that discrimination continued to be a problem in the criminal justice system.
Related posts are in the race index; more on Batson v. Kentucky, via Oyez.
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