Supreme Court hears Death Penalty Case involving the exclusion of Minority Jurors

• All White Juries By Design. Dallas Prosecutors Excluded 90% of the eligible Black jurors in Thomas Miller-El Death Penalty Trial.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday for the second time considered a nearly two-decade-old death penalty case involving a one-time Dallas County practice of excluding minorities from juries. In 1986, Thomas Miller-El was sentenced to die for the robbery and murder of an unarmed Irving, Texas, motel clerk. The case has become a focus for the court's ongoing scrutiny of the state's death penalty. Besides determining the fate of Miller-El's case, the high court could clarify how far prosecutors may go to exclude potential jurors. In February 2003, the Supreme Court returned Miller-El's case to lower courts, finding that Dallas County jury selection, particularly in capital cases, had been "suffused with bias." Justices sought reconsideration of Miller-El's complaints but stopped short of asking that he be retried. Seth Waxman, a former U.S. solicitor general now representing Miller-El, said previously considered evidence of prosecutorial misconduct ought to be enough to overturn determinations that no discrimination occurred.

• In Batson v. Kentucky - a case decided a few months after Miller-El was condemned to death - the Supreme Court prohibited any process that would tend to exclude potential jurors on the basis of race. The court ruled that peremptory strikes, in which potential jurors are dismissed without cause, could not be based on race. The landmark opinion cited a 1986 investigation by The Dallas Morning News. It found that Dallas prosecutors excluded 90 percent of black prospective jurors from all 15 capital murder cases between 1980 and 1986. Those cases included Miller-El's. Lawyers for Miller-El said prosecutors used time-tested methods to exclude minorities, particularly blacks, from death penalty juries. They questioned minorities in ways that other potential jurors were not, often discussing the graphic details of execution to elicit evidence of ambivalence toward capital punishment. When random selection of the jury pool produced too many blacks for consideration too early in the process, the juror panels were "shuffled" - effectively moving blacks further back in the pack.  By the time Miller-El's jury was selected, more than 91 percent of the blacks in his 108-person jury pool had been excluded. From the small pool of blacks remaining, one was selected. [more] and [more]
• A jury selection instruction manual used by prosecutors in Dallas, Texas, for instance, explains, "you are not looking for a fair juror, but rather a strong, biased and sometimes hypocritical individual who believes that Defendants are different from them in kind, rather than degree. You are not looking for any member of a minority group which may subject him to oppression-they almost always empathize with the accused" .  In "100 felony trials in that county in 1983-84, prosecutors peremptorily struck 405 out of 467 eligible jurors; the chance of a qualified Black siting on a jury was 1 in 10, compared to 1 in2 for a white person."  
  
• Pictured above: Thomas Miller - El one week after a stay of execution. [more]