For decades, scholars who have analyzed death-penalty cases have consistently found racial disparities, with death sentences disproportionately handed down to black men, more often in cases with white victims.
But defense lawyers who want to challenge these sentences continue to face a predicament: How do you prove that racial discrimination infected a specific case?
This broad question has often turned on the reasons that prosecutors offer for excluding black men and women from juries. Decades after the Jim Crow era of all-white juries, defense lawyers continue to argue that prosecutors — particularly in the South, where the death penalty is most popular — use more subtle methods to exclude blacks.
Clarity could come with a U.S. Supreme Court case, Foster v. Chatman, which will be argued on Monday and decided next year. Both prosecutors and defense lawyers hope the outcome will guide prosecutors to avoid accusations of bias while showing the defense what kind of evidence is necessary to prove that prosecutors really are discriminating.
In 1987, Timothy Tyrone Foster, 19, was sentenced to death for the murder of Queen Madge White, a 79-year-old white widow in Rome, Georgia, a small town near the Alabama border. White had just returned home from choir practice. Foster — who is currently on death row — was found guilty of breaking into her home, raping and strangling her, and stealing some of her possessions,including an air conditioner, several lamps, and drinking glasses.
[For more of this story, written by Maurice Chammah, go to https://www.themarshallproject...-proved?ref=hp-3-121]
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