SCOTUS Decries Racial Bias In Jury Selection

The U.S. Supreme Court this week found that prosecutors in a decades-old Georgia murder trial purposefully worked to exclude jurors based on race. The prosecutors’ “shifting explanations … misrepresentations and the persistent focus on race” during jury selection in a murder trial held nearly 30 years ago show evidence of “racial animosity,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a ruling this week. The evidence “plainly demonstrates a concerted effort to keep black prospective jurors off the jury.” Evidence included prosecutor’s notes in which the potential jurors had been marked and coded by race. The Supreme Court ruled 7-to-1 on the matter, with Justice Clarence Thomas the sole dissenter. Now the Georgia Supreme Court will determine whether the case, in which a black man was sentenced to death by an all-white jury in the death of a white woman in Rome, Ga., should be retried.