Top court overturns sentence due to exclusion of black juror

The parish in Louisiana has a controversial history of dismissal of black jurors.

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned the guilty verdict and death sentence of a Louisiana man convicted of hacking his wife’s lover to death, concluding that a black juror was unfairly excluded from the panel.

In a 7-2 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court said the state trial judge made a mistake when he allowed prosecutors to strike a black college student from the jury. Prosecutors said at the time that they thought the student worried too much about missing school to be an effective juror, but the court ruled that justification was a mere pretext, largely because the murder trial lasted only two days.

Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, said that the decision highlights a growing interest within the court in the fairness of the death penalty. “This has been an unusual court in that it has been looking at a lot of death penalty [appeals],” Denno said.

The justices also are currently considering whether the lethal injection method used to execute prisoners in more than 30 states is unconstitutional. “It’s a sign the court is acknowledging the problems with the death penalty in this country,” Denno said.

Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, where the trial took place, has a long history of controversy over the dismissal of black jurors. On appeal, lawyers for the defendant, Allen Snyder, claimed that the prosecutor in the case eliminated all of the potential black jurors in preparation for inflaming the jury’s racial passions. On several occasions, the prosecutor compared the case to that of O.J. Simpson. Snyder’s trial took place in 1996, just after the Simpson case garnered worldwide notoriety.

At the jury selection phase of the trial, lawyers questioned 85 potential jurors. In a parish where one in every five people was black, nine of the potential jurors were black. Four of them were dismissed for cause, and then the prosecutor used his peremptory challenges to eliminate the remaining five. Snyder was convicted and soon sentenced to death.

The striking of those final five jurors formed the basis of Snyder’s appeal. But since the Supreme Court only had to find racial bias in one instance, it did not address the exclusion of the other jurors. Snyder now receives a new trial.

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the opinion, along with Justice Antonin Scalia. Thomas wrote that the trial judge was in the best position to decide whether the prosecutor was striking jurors in good faith.

Jefferson Parish, which sits just across the river from New Orleans, is well-known for the zeal with which its prosecutors pursue death penalty cases. The prosecutor in Snyder’s case, James Williams, became infamous for keeping a toy electric chair on his desk with cutout photographs of the faces of five black men Williams sent to Death Row pasted on it.

In 2003, the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center reviewed some 23,000 prospective jurors for trials in the parish over 10 years and concluded that prosecutors were three times more likely to strike a black juror than a white one.

What was notable about the Snyder case is that a conviction seemed assured. In the summer of 1995, a jealous Snyder stabbed his estranged wife and her late-night companion, killing the man. He was captured by police and later confessed. His lawyers maintained that since it was a crime of passion, Snyder should have been charged with manslaughter, not capital murder.