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High court finds prosecutors acted with 'race bias'
From Bill Mears
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An African-American man's murder conviction has been thrown into doubt after the Supreme Court Tuesday found Texas prosecutors used "race bias" during jury selection. By an 8-1 margin, the justices ruled district attorneys in Dallas employed "race-based" challenges to exclude 10 of 11 African-Americans eligible to serve as jurors on the 1986 capital murder case. Citing "the prosecution's use of the jury shuffle and the historical evidence of racial discrimination by the Dallas County District Attorney's Office," the court determined Thomas Joe Miller-El's constitutional right to a fair trial had been violated. The justices said he should have been given a chance to prove his claims of bias during federal appeals. "Irrespective of whether the evidence could prove sufficient to support a charge of systematic exclusion of African-Americans, it reveals that the culture of the district attorney's office in the past was suffused with bias against African-Americans in jury selection," said Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority. The ruling does not necessarily mean Miller-El's conviction has been overturned. The case has been sent back to the lower courts, where he would likely get a new hearing on the bias claims. If successful, a court would then decide whether to order a new trial. Miller-El, his wife and another man were arrested after a 1985 armed robbery at a Dallas Holiday Inn. Prosecutors claimed Miller-El shot to death one of the motel employees, Doug Walker, and wounded another man. In his February 1986 murder trial, only one member of the jury was African-American. After his conviction, Miller-El objected, claiming his Sixth Amendment rights to a fair trial were violated. Miller-El's lawyers pointed to what they claim was a pattern of race bias by Texas prosecutors during jury selection, citing district attorney training manuals dating back more than 25 years that claim "minority races almost always empathize with the defendant." Lawyers also cited a 1986 report by the Dallas Morning News that showed 90 percent of eligible African-Americans were excluded by prosecutors using peremptory challenges in 15 death penalty cases from 1980 to 1986. Lower courts had denied Miller-El's petition, but his scheduled February 2002 execution was stayed, and the high court heard this case last fall. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, contending there was no "purposeful discrimination" by prosecutors, and that Miller-El's "arguments rest on circumstantial evidence and speculation." Prosecutors in Texas are allowed three "race-neutral" exceptions to exclude African-Americans from capital murder cases: ambivalence about the death penalty, hesitancy to convict defendants who could be rehabilitated and a juror's own history of criminal behavior. The court found those three criteria "pertained just as well to some white jurors who were not challenged and who did serve on the jury." Texas has led states in the number of executions since the death penalty was restored in 1976.
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