High Court Backs Death Row Inmate
The Supreme Court sided Tuesday with a black Texas death row inmate who claimed prosecutors stacked the jury with whites and said he was not allowed to present evidence of the alleged bias.
The high court ruled 8-1 that Thomas Miller-El should have been given an opportunity to present his evidence during his federal appeals. The court's action does not mean Miller-El will ultimately win his case. The justices sent the case back to a lower court, where Miller-El could get a new hearing on his claims that prosecutors used their power to challenge specific jurors as a way to eliminate 10 out of 11 potential black jurors before Miller-El's trial.
"This is an interesting result because it could ultimately change the way prosecutors choose jurors in Texas and elsewhere across the country," reports CBSNews.com Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen. "What the Court ruled is that a capital defendant should be allowed to present evidence on appeal that prosecutors selected a jury based upon race and that's just one step short, I think, of requiring prosecutors to more fully justify their decisions when it comes to selecting jurors."
The high court said it gave some weight to historical evidence uncovered by Miller-El's lawyers after his conviction. Among other things, Miller-El's lawyers claimed the Dallas district attorney's office once specifically trained prosecutors to get rid of minority juror candidates because ``they almost always empathize with the accused.''
His lawyers also cite a 1986 analysis by The Dallas Morning News. That study found that prosecutors used peremptory challenges to remove 90 percent of the blacks eligible to serve on the juries in 15 death penalty cases from 1980 to 1986.
"Irrespective of whether the evidence could prove sufficient to support a charge of systematic exclusion of African-Americans, it reveals that the culture of the district attorney's office in the past was suffused with bias against African-Americans in jury selection," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote.
Kennedy was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Justice Clarence Thomas, the court's only black member, dissented.
In related Supreme Court news:
The justices unanimously rejected arguments that states should not be allowed to use Social Security and other benefits to reimburse foster parents for things like food and clothing.