As there seems to be a fascination with Race, thought I would throw this into the mix.. interestingly Clarence Thomas dissented... nothing quite like all this race stuff being argued by a bunch of middle aged and older white men, but then again we know just about everything..
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...tory?track=rss
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court Wednesday overturned the guilty verdict and death sentence of a Louisiana man convicted of hacking his wife's lover to death, concluding that an African-American 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 an African-American 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.
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 African-American 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.
Supreme Court Throws out Death Row Verdict Race and issue
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