Supreme Court Preview: Foster v. Chatman
16th October 2015
I know that law is usually boring to non-lawyers, but every now and then an important case comes along that ought to concern everybody.
Foster involves a criminal trial in Georgia that led to a death sentence for Timothy Foster, an 18-year-old African-American who was accused of robbing and killing an elderly white woman. The prosecution used peremptory challenges, which permit parties in criminal or civil trials to remove potential jurors during jury selection, to eliminate every black prospective juror from Foster’s trial. Although the prosecution stated that it exercised its peremptory challenges for entirely race-neutral reasons, the record contains overwhelming evidence of purposeful—and therefore unconstitutional—racial discrimination. Examination of the prosecution’s own notes reveals that black jurors were singled out in at least five ways.
Increasingly these days we hear outraged claims of racism and racial bias in circumstances where such bleatings are obvious horseshit, but cases of bias do happen and this would appear to be one of them — not on the part of the jury, but on the part of prosecutors. Far too often prosecutors see their job as nailing somebody for a crime without caring too much which somebody gets nailed. This guy may be guilty — if I had to bet, that’s the way I would bet — but that doesn’t justify cutting corners on the way there.
I remember fondly a famous contributory negligence case we studied during my time in purgatory in which a drunk man wandered down the street in a frontier town and fell into a hole where workmen had been repairing the street. Of course, he sued the city. The city argued that he was at least partially to blame because he was drunk. The court ruled that a drunk man had as much right to a safe street as a sober man, and more need of one. We might extend that principle here to say that a guilty man has as much right to a fair trial as an innocent one, however cut and dried things might seem.