Muscogee County, Georgia, prosecutors could hardly have thought that overt racial discrimination was legal during jury selection proceedings in the 1970s. Yet they made little effort to disguise the practice, trying seven death penalty cases against black men from 1976 to 1979 in which not a single juror was black.
On Monday, one of those men, Johnny Lee Gates, filed a motion bringing new details about two prosecutors’ overtly racist tactics for jury selection to light, and asked for a new trial.
A motion filed on behalf of Johnny Lee Gates contends that potential jurors in his 1977 murder trial in Columbus were struck because they were black. Prosecutors’ notes from that jury selection show that all four names with an “N” beside them were struck. A “W” beside other names denotes a white potential juror. The numbers at left follow a 1-5 scale with 1 least desirable and 5 most favored by prosecutors.
In handwritten notes, Columbus prosecutors described prospective African-American jurors as “slow,” “ignorant,” “con artist” and “fat.” They also jotted a “B” or an “N” next to black people’s names on jury lists and routinely ranked them as the least desirable jurors. This astonishing system of race discrimination, revealed in a court motion filed Monday, was intended to exclude black people from juries in seven death-penalty cases against black defendants in the 1970s.
There were four prospective black jurors in Gates’s case; the prosecution struck all four.
If you’ve ever wanted to read a truly dodgy defense, consider this one: Sure, he says it happened seven times, but that’s not a pattern, is it?
The Muscogee County District Attorney’s Office has yet to explain or defend the exclusion of black jurors by its prosecutors in the 1970s. Instead, in a recent court filing, it said Gates’ claims should be rejected because he is relying on just seven capital cases. To prevail, Gates must show systematic exclusion of blacks “in case after case, whatever the circumstances, whatever the crime and whoever the defendant or victim may be,” the DA’s office said.
Only when one prosecutor, William Smith, didn’t have enough strikes—a way to veto jurors—did African-American jurors make it onto a jury in a case he tried.
Smith was involved in four of the seven death-penalty cases that were tried from 1976 to 1979, the motion said. In three of those cases, all 15 prospective black jurors were struck by the prosecution. In the fourth case, involving defendant William Henry Hance, prosecutors struck 10 of the 13 prospective black jurors, allowing two African-Americans to decide his fate, the motion said.
But in Hance’s case, “an all-white jury was impossible because the pool of prospective jurors had more black citizens than the prosecutors had strikes,” the motion noted.
District Attorney Douglas Pullen, then Smith’s assistant district attorney, was involved in five of the death penalty prosecutions; all had white juries. A total of 27 prospective black jurors were struck by the prosecution across the five cases. There’s really no other explanation but race, even if they hadn’t left such a clear trail in the form of “N” and “B” beside prospective jurors names.
Michael Lacey, a Georgia Tech mathematics professor, reviewed the jury strikes made by prosecutors in these seven capital cases. The probability that black jurors were removed for race-neutral reasons was .000000000000000000000000000004 percent, Lacey said in a sworn statement filed by Gates’ legal team.
Gates has the backing of the Southern Center for Human Rights,
“Every person accused of a criminal offense has the right to a fair trial that’s free of race discrimination,” said Patrick Mulvaney, a lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights and a member of Gates’ legal team. “Mr. Gates’s trial was undermined by race discrimination from the start.”
In court filings, Gates’ lawyers say the prosecution’s alleged discrimination against black jurors “was harmful to the community and the integrity of the judicial system.”
It’s sadly necessary to continue fighting just to uphold laws and rulings that any member of the judiciary, of law enforcement, should know. But a victory could deter the next prosecutor tempted to select on the basis of race. Ojalá.