Robert Nathaniel Jones appealed
his felony conviction for possessing a controlled substance. He said that the
State peremptorily struck an African-American veniremember in violation of Batson
v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986). He claimed that the State’s
explanation for striking one African-American veniremember applied identically to
three non-African-American veniremembers who ultimately served on the jury.
The State said that, after
striking less favorable veniremembers, it used its final strikes against
veniremembers who rated law enforcement in their community a “seven” on a scale
of one to ten. It said its strategy was to “str[ike] everybody who was a six
[on law enforcement] and then everyone who was a seven, up until [it] got to
the point of . . . [veniremember number] 26 or 27,” where it “ran out of
strikes”; it “took seven or lower and just moved up the scale from
[veniremember number] one.”
The trial court should not have accepted
this explanation because it is against the record. When the State struck
veniremember number twenty-four, an African American, it skipped over two non-African-American
veniremembers with lower numbers who also gave law enforcement a score of
seven. Additionally, the State’s strikes revealed disparate treatment of
African-American veniremembers. So Justice J. Brett Busby, writing for a panel
including Chief Justice Kem Thompson Frost and Justice Marc W. Brown reversed
and remanded the case for retrial.
Trial lawyers, Batson error
is very rarely properly preserved, but that’s old
news for readers of this blog.
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