High Court Rules for Inmate in Texas Death penalty Case

WASHINGTON–The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that an African American on death row in Texas should get another chance to have his sentence overturned because of alleged racial bias at his 1986 murder trial, a decision that sends a stern reminder to lower courts that they must guard against constitutional violations in the criminal justice system.
By a vote of 8 to 1, the court ruled that the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit should have granted Thomas Joe Miller-El a hearing on his claim that two Dallas County district attorneys violated his constitutional right to a discrimination-free trial by summarily excluding 10 of the 11 blacks who were eligible to serve on the jury in his case.
The 5th Circuit said that Miller-El lacked “clear and convincing” proof of racial bias, but this was the wrong legal standard, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday; to gain a hearing, all he needed to show was that his claim “was debatable among jurists of reason.”
“In this case, the statistical evidence alone raises some debate as to whether the prosecution acted with a race-based reason when striking prospective jurors,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the opinion for the court.
The court, Kennedy wrote, also found “relevant” Miller-El’s evidence that the Dallas County district attorney’s office had been “suffused with bias” in the past, including the use of a 1963 circular instructing prosecutors, “Do not take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans … on a jury.”
Capital punishment foes and advocates of changes in the criminal-justice system had made a cause of Miller-El’s appeal, arguing that it reflected the reasons why many Americans, especially minorities, distrust the criminal justice system.