Ohio Death-Row Prisoner Granted New Trial After Lawyer Allowed Racially Biased Juror to Sit on Jury

The Ohio Supreme Court has grant­ed a new tri­al to a Cincinnati death-row pris­on­er whose lawyer’s inac­tion per­mit­ted a racial­ly biased juror to serve in his case. In a 5 – 2 opin­ion issued February 27, 2020, the court ruled that defense coun­sel for Glen Bates (pic­tured) had been inef­fec­tive for fail­ing to ques­tion a juror about her racial bias, chal­lenge her for cause, or exer­cise one of his remain­ing dis­cre­tionary strikes to pre­vent her from serv­ing in the case, in vio­la­tion of his right to an impartial jury.

Bates had been con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in 2015 for the mur­der of his two-year-old daugh­ter. Evidence in the case showed she had been starved and abused over an extend­ed time period. 

Several jurors indi­cat­ed in respons­es to a jury ques­tion­naire that “[s]ome races and/​or eth­nic groups tend to be more vio­lent than oth­ers.” One white juror indi­cat­ed that she ​“strong­ly agree[d]” with that state­ment, then wrote in the space pro­vid­ed for expla­na­tion: ​“Blacks.” When asked whether there was ​“any racial or eth­nic group that you do not feel com­fort­able being around?,” she respond­ed: ​“Sometimes black peo­ple.” Even though Bates is Black, his lawyer accept­ed the juror with­out ques­tion­ing her about her bias­es, chal­leng­ing her for cause, or using an avail­able peremp­to­ry chal­lenge to strike her from the jury.

The major­i­ty opin­ion found that the seat­ing of this juror cre­at­ed a con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly unac­cept­able risk that a ​“pow­er­ful racial stereo­type — that of black men as ​‘vio­lence prone,’ infect­ed the jury’s delib­er­a­tions.” The court reversed Bates’ con­vic­tion and death sen­tence and direct­ed that he be grant­ed a new trial.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) sub­mit­ted a brief in sup­port of Bates’ appeal, pro­vid­ing his­tor­i­cal con­text for his con­cerns about racial bias in his case. The LDF brief described Cincinnati’s sta­tus as ​“one of the nation’s most racial­ly seg­re­gat­ed cities” and its his­to­ry of racial vio­lence dur­ing the peri­od in which many of the jurors lived there, includ­ing a stretch of 15 police killings of Black men in one six-year peri­od and the fatal shoot­ing of an unarmed Black motorist by a University of Cincinnati police offi­cer while Bates was awaiting trial. 

Noting racial­ly biased ques­tion­naire respons­es from at least three white jurors, the LDF brief char­ac­ter­ized as ​“inexplicabl[e]” counsel’s fail­ure to address those issues dur­ing jury selec­tion. ​“The racial­ly biased views of mem­bers of Mr. Bates’s jury have no place in any judi­cial process, let alone a cap­i­tal tri­al,” LDF wrote. ​“Public con­fi­dence in the jus­tice sys­tem can­not sur­vive if Ohio exe­cutes an African-American man sen­tenced to death by a jury infect­ed with the kind of bla­tant racial bias demon­strat­ed in this case.”

In a con­cur­ring opin­ion, Judge Judith French said the grue­some nature of the crime cre­at­ed a height­ened need for fair process. ​“Our job, in the face of those facts,” she wrote, ​“is to ensure that all con­sti­tu­tion­al guar­an­tees were met. It is also easy to grant those pro­tec­tions when the facts at issue are unemo­tion­al and do not cause our pas­sions to rise. But here, fac­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that a prospec­tive juror may respond to accu­sa­tions of such cru­el­ty by pre­judg­ing a defen­dant because of his race, we — and defense coun­sel, the pros­e­cu­tion, and the tri­al court — must be extra vigilant.”