Huge Racial Implications to U.S. Supreme Court Death Penalty Case, Says Salt Lake City Attorney

SALT LAKE CITY - May 29, 2015 - PRLog -- The United States Supreme Court agreed on May 26 to hear an appeal from a Georgia man who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by an all-white jury nearly three decades ago. Salt Lake City violent crime defense lawyer Darren Levitt of Levitt Legal, PLLC said that what makes the case of Timothy Tyrone Foster v. Carl Humphrey so disturbing is the way that the scope of evidence Foster’s attorneys uncovered demonstrates how prosecutors knowingly, intentionally, and openly struck every black prospective juror from the jury pool.

“It is simply stunning that prosecutors could act this egregiously less than a year after the Supreme Court ruled in Batson v. Kentucky that another prosecutor's use of peremptory challenges to strike jurors simply because of race violated the plaintiff’s Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to a fair jury trial,” Levitt said. “Just as Justice Lewis Powell remarked how selection procedures purposefully excluding black people from juries undermines public confidence in the fairness of our system of justice, the Supreme Court needs to recognize how failure to rule in Mr. Foster’s favor in this case would basically be doing the same.”

Foster was arrested one month after the August 27, 1986, murder of white 79-year-old schoolteacher, Queen Madge White. However, Foster’s lawyers uncovered numerous instances of seeming racial discrimination in the notes of prosecutors that were released through an open records request.

The notes reflected how prosecutors not only highlighted the name of every black prospective juror in green on four different copies of the jury list and wrote how such highlighting represented black jurors, but also circled the word “BLACK” next to the question about race on the juror questionnaires. Additionally, prosecutors identified three black prospective jurors as “B#1,” “B#2,” and “B#3”, and they ranked each black prospective juror against the others in case “it comes down to having to pick one of the black jurors.”

“The prosecutors in Foster v. Humphrey created strike lists that clearly contradict the supposedly race-neutral explanations they provided for eliminating black prospective jurors,” Levitt said. “Proving that peremptory challenges were racially motivated is usually very difficult because it requires demonstrating a person’s state of mind, but I simply do not think the intent could be more clear than it was in this case.”

The Georgia Supreme Court and state courts affirmed the judge’s rejection of defense counsel’s Batson challenge to the race-neutral reasons provided by prosecutors for removing black prospective jurors. In concurring with the 7-2 majority in Batson, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote that the decision took “a historic step toward eliminating the shameful practice of racial discrimination in the selection of juries,” but it “would not end the racial discrimination that peremptories inject into the jury-selection process. That goal can be accomplished only by eliminating peremptory challenges entirely.”

Levitt Legal, PLLC represents clients facing violent crime charges in Salt Lake County, Weber County, Morgan County, Davis County, Wasatch County, Utah County, Tooele County, Summit County, Box Elder County, and Cache County. Darren Levitt is licensed in state and federal courts throughout Utah, and he handled such cases as assault, robbery, kidnapping, criminal homicide, murder, and manslaughter among many other charges.

For more information, call Darren Levitt of Levitt Legal, PLLC at (801) 531-1030 or visit http://www.defenselawutah.com/ to fill out a contact form.