Essay 4783

From The Chicago Tribune…

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Supreme Court to review alleged racial factor in choosing juries

By James Oliphant, Tribune national correspondent

NEW ORLEANS -- Jefferson Parish, a nearby cousin to New Orleans, takes pride in being different, a law-and-order antidote to the crime and chaos that have often gripped this city.

The Crescent City Connection bridge was famously blocked by police in the days after Hurricane Katrina to prevent, many said, the city’s impoverished and angry African-American evacuees from spilling from the flooded ruins over to the majority-white parish on the other side.

Jefferson Parish was the place that gave birth to the political career of ex-Klansman David Duke. Few parishes in Louisiana embrace the death penalty with the fervor of Jefferson. Critics charge that for its prosecutors, simply gaining a conviction often isn’t good enough and that going the extra mile sometimes includes keeping as many black people off juries as possible.

The accusation of race-based jury selection will be aired before the U.S. Supreme Court this week in a case involving a former Jefferson Parish prosecutor who once kept a toy electric chair on his desk. A lawsuit filed by a Death Row inmate, Allen Snyder, alleges that the prosecutor struck all the African-Americans from the jury in his case in order to encourage the white jury to do some racial score-settling in the days after the world-famous O.J. Simpson trial.

This won’t be the first time the justices have addressed the issue of racially motivated jury strikes. The court first condemned the practice more than 40 years ago, ruling that striking a juror because of his race is unconstitutional. But that wasn’t the end of the matter. The issue in Snyder vs. Louisiana is the kind of evidence a court can examine in trying to determine the prosecutor’s overall motive for striking jurors.

Snyder contends that the desire to compare his case to Simpson’s is proof that prosecutors intentionally kept blacks from the jury. Some court watchers believe the Supreme Court might have taken the case because of the provocative Simpson angle, perhaps looking to make a point about whether such comparisons prejudice other African-American defendants.

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