Justice Breyer! & A Supreme Court Ruling!!!
Hello everyone,
I hope that your week went very well! I have been extremely busy preparing to spend four days in Alabama for an evidentiary hearing. This is where we get to show the court our evidence supporting a life sentence instead of the death penalty. Lucky for me, a few very important legal issues have come up and I am being utilized to figure those issues out. It's very exciting! I love having that type of adrenaline rush.
Anyway, there are two very exciting things that have come up that I wanted to share with you:
The first thing is that Justice Breyer is going to be our main commencement speaker. Justice Breyer has been an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court since 1994 and is generally known for being on the more "liberal leaning" side of the court. Plenty of people are super excited about his attendance, including me! I have to admit, I wasn't very nervous about speaking at graduation until this announcement was posted. I am still a bit nervous, but will work through that. I still have almost two months, right.
The second thing I wanted to share with you is that the Southern Center took on a Louisiana case a few years ago and the Supreme Court finally ruled on the case, IN OUR FAVOR. Here is a little synopsis that I am posting from the American Bar Associations' Criminal Justice Section and a link to the full opinion if you are interested. Last week was a GREAT week!!!
Snyder v. Louisiana
By a 7-2 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court found that prosecutor Jim Williams improperly excluded blacks from the jury that convicted Allen Snyder of killing his estranged wife's companion. Snyder is black and the jurors were white. Justice Alito, writing for the majority, said the trial judge should have blocked Williams from striking a black juror. Justices Thomas and Scalia dissented. Thomas said he would not "second-guess" the judge. In a 4-3 decision, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that race had no part in the state's decisions involving black potential jurors.
During jury selection in the trial, Williams disqualified all five blacks in the pool of prospective jurors. The Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that prosecutors may not exclude people from a jury solely because of their race. The court already had sent Snyder's case back to the Louisiana courts following a ruling in 2005 that bolstered the prohibition on race bias in jury selection.
The prosecutor's explanation for striking a prospective black juror was "suspicious," said Alito. The prospective juror's supervisor said he did not think a schedule conflict between the upcoming trial and the prospective juror's work would be a problem. In contrast, the prosecutor accepted white jurors who disclosed conflicting obligations "that appear to have been at least as serious as" the prospective black juror who was excused, Alito wrote.
Stephen Bright, Snyder's Atlanta-based lawyer, said the ruling shows there is broad agreement among the justices that courts must closely examine the reasons given for excusing potential jurors when racial motives might be present but not acknowledged. "The disturbing thing is that courts in Louisiana and elsewhere were just deferring to trial judges, no matter the reasons," Bright said. Snyder will get a new trial as a result of the ruling.
Click on the link below to access the full opinion. If you cannot click on the link, copy and paste it into your browser.