Arnold Holloway, a Pennsylvania death row inmate who was convicted 18 years ago, was granted a new trial after a federal appeals court found that prosecutors improperly excluded blacks from the jury. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit said that an assistant district attorney in Holloway’s case used 11 of his 12 peremptory strikes during jury selection to eliminate blacks. “The pattern here was certainly strong enough to suggest an intention of keeping blacks off the jury,” said Circuit Judge Robert Cowen. Philadelphia prosecutors’ jury-selection practices came under closer scrutiny in 1997 when a heated campaign for the city’s district attorney’s office resulted in the public release of a secret training video instructing rookie prosecutors to keep poor blacks off juries because they were less likely to convict. Since that time, there has been a string of at least five death row inmates granted new trials because of evidence that Philadelphia prosecutors used race bias in selecting jurors. (Associated Press, January 23, 2004) See Race; and DPIC’s Report: The Death Penalty in Black and White.