Opinion ID: 1036479
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Alleged Racial Discrimination History

Text: Lee also alleges that a history of racial discrimination in jury selections by the district attorney’s office demonstrates that the State was motivated by race in the jury selection. Lee’s hurdle here is that his trial counsel did not introduce, or even proffer, any evidence in the trial court to support that allegation. Rather, all trial counsel did was cite the single case of “Robert Thomas v. State.” In that case, however, the state supreme court did not find a Batson violation, but remanded the case for further proceedings. Ex parte Thomas, 601 So. 2d 56, 58–59 (Ala. 1992). We review Ex parte Thomas to show exactly what happened there. In Ex parte Thomas, the same district attorney’s office used 8 of its 11 peremptory strikes against black venire members, stating they had misdemeanor convictions and/or bad driving records, based on a document prepared by a state 113 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 114 of 128 investigator. Id. at 57. The trial court sustained the State’s objection to producing the document and overruled the defendant’s Batson motion. Id. The Alabama Supreme Court reversed and remanded, concluding that the trial court erroneously “accepte[d] at face value the State’s ostensibly facially neutral explanations for the use of its peremptory challenges, which were, with regard to three of the black veniremembers who were struck, based exclusively on information contained in the document to which only the State had access.” Id. at 58 (emphasis added). The Alabama Supreme Court noted in Ex parte Thomas that it “might be in a position to affirm” had, inter alia, the state trial court “ordered the State to produce the document that it used in exercising its peremptory challenges.” Id. at 59. The Alabama Supreme Court did not find a Batson violation, only that the defense was entitled on remand to “an opportunity to prove that the seemingly facially neutral explanations offered by the State were a sham or pretext.” Id. at 58. In Lee’s case, by contrast, prosecutor Greene turned over to Lee’s trial counsel the venire members’ criminal histories. If anything, Ex parte Thomas helps the State here, because Lee’s counsel had the criminal histories but never disputed the credibility of the prosecutor’s arrest-record reason for striking venire members Demond Martin, Alice Scott, and Johnnie Hall. Similarly, in his state direct appeal brief, Lee’s appellate counsel did not proffer any evidence either. Lee’s counsel did cite two Alabama cases prosecuted 114 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 115 of 128 by the same district attorney’s office where the same Alabama appellate court reversed based on a Batson violation. See Kynard v. State, 631 So. 2d 257, 261– 70 (Ala. Crim. App. 1993) (although venire was 35% black, the jury had 10 white jurors and 2 black jurors, or was only 17% black); Duncan v. State, 612 So. 2d 1304, 1307–11 (Ala. Crim. App. 1992) (jury composition not noted). Lee’s appellate counsel cited one case in which the Alabama appellate court affirmed, albeit concluding that the trial court had correctly seated a black juror the State struck. See Marks v. State, 581 So. 2d 1182, 1186–87 (Ala. Crim. App. 1990) (jury composition not noted). What Lee ignores is that the trials in Kynard, Duncan, and Marks occurred at least a decade before Lee’s trial and shortly after Batson was decided.36 In both Kynard and Duncan, the state appellate court found the State’s strike reasons were either not supported by the record or were pretextual based on the State’s failure to strike white venire members for the same reasons or both. In contrast, in Lee’s case that same Alabama appellate court found the prosecutor’s strike reasons were race-neutral, supported by the record, and not pretextual due to disparate treatment. 36 Specifically, in Kynard, the offense occurred on September 2, 1988, 631 So. 2d at 258– 59, and the appeal was docketed in 1990 (appeal number 90-320), which shows the trial occurred between 1988 and 1990. In Duncan, the offense occurred on October 11, 1987, 575 So. 2d 1198, 1199 (Ala. Crim. App. 1990), and the first appellate decision was on August 3, 1990, which shows the trial occurred between 1987 and 1990. In Marks, the offenses occurred between February and March of 1982, 581 So. 2d at 1183, and the appeal was docketed in 1989 (appeal number 89-410), which shows the trial occurred between 1982 and 1989. 115 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 116 of 128 As the State points out, it is telling that, in his direct appeal, Lee cited only a handful of reversals out of the thousands of cases prosecuted by this district attorney’s office, which prosecutes cases in five Alabama counties. We cannot say these few cases where the trials occurred more than a decade before Lee’s trial establish that the prosecutor’s peremptory-strike reasons in Lee’s particular case were pretextual and discriminatory.37 Before the state appellate court, Lee focused his arguments on the State’s strikes of seven black venire members. As recounted above, the state appellate court considered Lee’s arguments in light of the record and concluded that the State’s strike reasons for those seven venire members were supported by the record and did not demonstrate disparate treatment. In this appeal, although Lee continues to claim the State’s strikes against each of the 21 black venire members violated Batson, Lee’s brief before us focuses primarily on only two venire members, David Gutridge and Demond Martin, and thus we discuss them in more detail. 37 In his direct appeal, Lee also cited three cases where the Alabama courts found no Batson violation. Stephens v. State, 580 So. 2d 11 (Ala. Crim. App. 1990) (seven white jurors and five black jurors on jury in a 1987 trial); McGahee v. State, 554 So. 2d 454 (Ala. Crim. App. 1989) (all-white jury in a 1986-1987 trial); and Currin v. State, 535 So. 2d 221 (Ala. Crim. App. 1988) (70% black jury in 1987 trial). These three trials occurred at least 13 years before Lee’s 2000 trial. As discussed, in 2009, this Court concluded that the defendant in McGahee was entitled to § 2254 relief. Although we have previously discussed McGahee, we also distinguish it factually from Lee’s case later. 116 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 117 of 128