High court passes on case of Georgia man on death row who says Black jurors were wrongly purged

ATLANTA– The Supreme Court of the United States refused Tuesday to hear the case of a black man sentenced to death in Georgia, saying his trial was unfair because the prosecutor wrongly excluded black jurors.

Warren King, 48, was convicted of murder and other crimes in the September 1994 shooting death of convenience store clerk Karen Crosby during a robbery in southeastern Georgia. During his trial, the prosecution used strikes to eliminate 87.5 percent of eligible black jurors and only 8.8 percent of eligible white jurors, all of whom were women.

A 1986 U.S. Supreme Court ruling established what is known as the “Batson” rulewhich prohibits the exclusion of potential jurors based on their race. King’s lawyers say the prosecutor in his case violated that rule and fought back when King’s trial lawyers raised concerns during jury selection that he was excluding black jurors because of their race.

“Discrimination based on race and gender should have no place in our criminal justice system, especially when a man’s life is at stake,” Anna Arceneaux, one of King’s attorneys, said in a statement. “The U.S. Supreme Court should have stepped in to uphold this fundamental constitutional principle, given the blatant and horrific nature of the plaintiff’s discrimination in this case.”

The Georgia Supreme Court upheld King’s convictions and sentence without any mention of prosecutor John Johnson’s lengthy statements criticizing the Batson Rule or the speed with which he struck black and female jurors. In the final stages of the appeals process, the 11th U.S. Court of Appeals called the record in the case “troubling” but deferred to the state court’s findings.

King’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to intervene. supreme court gave no reason for declining to hear King’s case. But Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, saying she would send the case back to the 11th Circuit to consider King’s claims under the Batson rule without relying on the state court’s findings.

Johnson declined to comment by telephone Tuesday, saying the Supreme Court decision “pretty much speaks for itself.”

During jury selection, each side has a number of “peremptory strikes,” which can be used to dismiss a juror without giving a reason. But if attorneys believe the other side is dismissing jurors solely because of their race, they can file a Batson challenge.

When King’s lawyers challenged the state’s use of strikes, the judge ordered Johnson to explain his reasoning. Before he did so, he objected to the use of “statistical analysis” to determine possible discrimination and objected to the Batson lawsuit.

He then gave reasons for his expulsions. The judge accepted his explanation until he said that he was expelling a juror because “this lady is a black woman” who was from the same area as King and knew him and his family. The judge noted that the woman had said she did not know King or his family, found that her expulsion violated the Batson Rule, and ordered her to sit on the jury.

Johnson subsequently spoke out against the Batson rule again, arguing, among other things, that “Batson now makes us look (at) whether people are black or not. Not whether they’re black or white, but black or not. … it’s inappropriate to require people to be put back on a jury, which I have a problem with in this case,” according to court documents.

He told the judge he was “very angry right now,” but suggested the woman sit on the jury while allowing his other sentences to stand. The judge and King’s attorneys eventually agreed, and the jury that convicted King consisted of 10 white jurors and two black jurors.

A law governing the final stage of appeals requires a federal court to defer to state courts’ decisions on questions of fact unless the state court’s findings were unreasonable.

“The Georgia Supreme Court’s narrow consideration of each of Prosecutor Johnson’s criticisms — divorced from context — ignored highly relevant facts and circumstances in three critical areas,” Jackson wrote in her opinion, arguing that the court ignored “highly relevant facts.”

She said the Georgia Supreme Court ignored the “egregious nature” of the violation for the affected juror who was ultimately appointed. The court also said nothing about Johnson’s “multiple heated outbursts, all of which made his hostility toward Batson abundantly clear,” she wrote. And she noted that “racial disparities in a prosecutor’s exercise of peremptory strikes are highly indicative of discriminatory intent” and the court failed to mention that Johnson was about 10 times more likely to exclude a black juror than a white juror.

For those reasons, Jackson wrote, the 11th Circuit should have considered the merits of King’s claims without regard to the state court’s factual findings.