The racially discriminatory jury selection practices of the Clark County, Nevada, District Attorney’s office are now causing it to lose convictions in capital cases. In a December 18 article, the prosecutorial watchdog, The Open File, details repeated violations by Clark County death-penalty prosecutors of the constitutional proscription against striking prospective jurors from service on the basis of race. Four times in the past four years, the Nevada Supreme Court has ordered new trials in Clark County cases because prosecutors violated the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky by discriminatorily excluding jurors of color, including in three cases in which the death penalty had been imposed. The Open Files writes that “prosecutors in the Clark County District Attorney’s office either do not know, ignore, or gamble on Batson, unsuccessfully hoping the courts will not hold them accountable to it.” In June 2014, the Nevada Supreme Court reversed the conviction and death sentence of Charles Conner, after prosecutors used six of their nine peremptory strikes against jurors of color, claiming that the jurors were “weak” on the death penalty. The court ruled that this purportedly race-neutral justification was pretextual, noting that one of the black jurors to whom prosecutors claimed the justification applied was an Air Force Reserve officer and full-time correctional officer, who had previously served in the Navy and as a police officer. The court found that the prosecutors’ explanations for striking this juror were “belied by the record” and that manufacturing “[a] race-neutral explanation that is belied by the record is evidence of purposeful discrimination.” In March 2016, the court granted African-American death-row prisoner Jason McCarty a new trial after Clark County prosecutors excluded two of three eligible black jurors, pretextually attempting to justifying the strikes on the grounds that one worked in a strip club and the other had a brother with a criminal record. However, prosecuters had run detailed employment background checks on only two of the 36 potential jurors, suggesting to the court that prosecutors had not been genuinely concerned about the excluded juror’s employment. The prosecutors also disparately questioned jurors whose family members had criminal histories, asking the black juror whom they struck 15 follow-up questions, while asking a similarly-situated white juror a single follow-up question. In granting McCarty a new trial, the court observed: “Discriminatory jury selection is particularly concerning in capital cases where each juror has the power to decide whether the defendant is deserving of the ultimate penalty, death.” In October 2017, the court also granted a new trial to third death-row prisoner, Julius Bradford, after the trial court had permitted the prosecution to strike one Hispanic and one African-American juror without providing the defense an opportunity to contest the race-based nature of the strikes.
Clark County sentenced four defendants to death in 2017, the second highest total of any county in the United States, and is one of only four counties in the country to have imposed eight or more death sentences over the course of the last five years. It has imposed 14 of Nevada’s last 15 death sentences. In 2016, Clark County was identified by Harvard University’s Fair Punishment Project as one of the nation’s “outlier counties” whose overproduction of death sentences was accompanied by “a history of racial bias.”
(“NV: Clark County DA: Racially Discriminating … and Losing Convictions,” The Open File: Prosecutorial Misconduct and Accountability, December 18, 2017; B. Botkin, “Nevada Supreme Court reverses death row conviction,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, October 25, 2017; “CLARK COUNTY, NEVADA, ‘RODEO ON BATSON’ CONTINUES,” Fair Punishment Project, April 5, 2016.) Read the Nevada Supreme Court’s decisions in Connor v. Nevada, McCarty v. Nevada, and Bradford v. Nevada. See Prosecutorial Misconduct, Race, and Sentencing.
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