Newspaper editorials from papers in Texas and other areas of the country praised the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Thomas Miller-El and criticized the way in which the death penalty has been implemented in Texas. Miller-El was granted a new trial in light of strong evidence of racial bias during jury selection at his original trial. Editorial excerpts follow:
New York Times
[Miller-El] is an important ruling that reiterates to all courts the importance of keeping discrimination out of jury selection.
…
In the landmark 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court set out guidelines for how courts should examine jury selection for evidence of discrimination. In yesterday’s case [Miller-El v. Dretke], the court did just that, and found that race had repeatedly played an inappropriate role. The court found clear disparities in everything from how prospective jurors of different races were questioned to what factors the prosecution considered valid reasons for striking them. The court repeatedly rejected the prosecutors’ race-neutral explanations for their actions.
…
It is disturbing that before the Supreme Court heard Mr. Miller-El’s claim, it was denied by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas. The misconduct in this case was clear enough that the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 to reverse, with the centrist conservatives Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy joining the majority. It is a sign of how far the lower federal courts have drifted to the right that the Supreme Court had to correct this racially discriminatory prosecution. (New York Times, June 14, 2005).
Washington Post
The Supreme Court reined in racial manipulation in jury selection yesterday, throwing out the capital conviction of a Texas man named Thomas Joe Miller-El.
…
Mr. Miller-El’s case confronted the court with the question of how blatantly jury selection may be guided by race before it runs afoul of the Constitution. Prosecutors in Dallas, where Mr. Miller-El was prosecuted for a vicious murder, had a history of trying to keep blacks from jury service. A training manual in the 1960s instructed them not to “take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans or a member of any minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or how well educated.” Such policies were no longer written down when Mr. Miller-El went on trial in 1986, but they lived on. … The machinations in Mr. Miller-El’s case, as the high court has now found, were obvious. Prosecutors, Justice David H. Souter writes, questioned black potential jurors differently from whites and shuffled the roster to push blacks further back in the line of eligibility. Of 11 who were nonetheless deemed qualified, prosecutors then struck 10 using peremptory challenges.
…
[T]his ruling sends a strong message to prosecutors and lower courts alike that such manipulations are not tolerable. (Washington Post, June 14, 2005).
Dallas Morning News
The record shows that Mr. Miller-El, who is black, got a raw deal at trial. Prosecutors used various tricks to effectively eliminate 91 percent of blacks in his jury pool.District Attorney Bill Hill’s office can’t be surprised at the ruling, considering that the court had telegraphed this punch. In an earlier round on this case, the court branded the district attorney’s office of 20 years ago as “suffused with bias.”
…
[P]rotecting one man’s right to trial by a jury of peers protects us all.
…
Their long wait for justice in the case is a result of prosecutorial shenanigans that were only shrewd in the short term. A solid justice system is built on a far broader foundation. (Dallas Morning News, June 14, 2005).
Houston Chronicle
In the manner of a long-suffering parent faced with a disingenuously obstreperous child, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday told the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — one more time — how wrong it was in interpreting yet another major principle in capital-punishment cases.
Racial discrimination in jury selection, no matter how Texas prosecutors tried to hide the ugly practice, is unconstitutional, the court ruled, reversing an almost 20-year-old murder conviction from Dallas County.
…
“It blinks reality” to find that prospective black jurors were struck by prosecutors for any reason other than their race, the court said. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals’ finding otherwise was “wrong to a clear and convincing degree.” The state court’s “conclusion was unreasonable as well as erroneous.”
…
Texas’ full-throated resort to the death penalty demands that all procedures pertaining to this maximum punishment be applied with the utmost, unquestioned prosecutorial integrity and that those operations are reviewed by courts that can acknowledge what may be going on. (Houston Chronicle, June 14, 2005).
Read the complete decision. See DPIC’s page on the Miller-El case. See also Race. To view a video (need RealPlayer) about the Miller-El case, click here.
