Deference to Trial Judge Debated in Jury Bias Case
A case concerning the exclusion of black jurors in a criminal case was back before the U.S. Supreme Court for oral arguments yesterday.
Death-row inmate Allen Snyder is challenging the prosecutor’s use of challenges to excuse blacks from the jury panel and also his remarks, made during arguments in the death penalty phase, in which he compared Snyder’s case to that of O.J. Simpson.
Snyder was convicted of wounding his estranged wife and killing her lover as they returned from a date, the ABA Journal reports in its preview of the case.
The Louisiana Supreme Court has twice affirmed Snyder’s conviction. The second time was after the U.S. Supreme Court asked it to consider the case in light of its 2005 decision in Miller-el v. Dretke, the New York Times reports. Miller-El allowed defendants to use evidence beyond their own cases to prove racial motives in prosecutors’ use of peremptory challenges.
The makeup of the court has changed since the Miller-El decision, the Times says, and the changed court appears more inclined to defer to the findings of trial judges.
Snyder’s lawyer, Stephen Bright, argued that the prosecutor had demonstrated racial bias by differences in the way he questioned black jurors and responded to their answers.
But Justice Antonin Scalia emphasized the trial judge’s ability to judge the responses of potential jurors in a way that can’t be communicated from the written record, Law.com reports. “The [trial] judge is in a much better position to decide those matters,” he said.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg questioned whether the court should rely on the trial judge’s decisions, the Washington Post reports. “The judge was quite passive,” she said.
The Times noted that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was “uncharacteristically silent” during most of the argument. He joined the majority in the Miller-El case but wrote an opinion last term that said trial judges were in a superior position to assess whether jurors could be fair in applying the death penalty.
“Justice Kennedy was struggling to decide whether he was the justice of 2005 or the justice of the last term,” the Times wrote. “His answer is likely to determine the outcome of this case and many others.”
