Opinion ID: 78318
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 10

Heading: Mollerose Carpenter

Text: Our interpretation of the State's reasons for striking Lemuel Jones is further supported by the fact that the State gave a similar reason for striking another African-American juror, Mollerose Carpenter. In full, the State claimed that: We struck juror number 17, Mollerose Carpenter, black female, who was a service representative at the Telephone Company. She was an individual who we had very little information on other than the fact that she was working at the Telephone Company. What we observed during the course of examination was reported to us at one point in time that she appeared to be upset or glaring at the parties from the District Attorney's Office and asking questions. She was divorced. There was some concern on our part about maintaining her as a juror, but not having any further information, recommended that level of striking, especially after Dr. Wright was struck, juror number 99. We felt we would be required to strike her. McGahee, 554 So.2d at 462. We are most concerned with the last reason the State gave for striking Carpenter. There was some concern on our part about maintaining her as a juror, but not having any further information, recommended that level of striking, especially after Dr. Wright was struck, juror number 99. We felt we would be required to strike her. Id. When read in the context of the State's striking Lemuel Jones, it is evident that the State was concerned by the prospect of having Mollerose Carpenter serve as an African-American juror without Dr. Wright on the jury. As with Lemuel Jones, the only significant connection Dr. Wright shared with Carpenter was that both were African-American. As with Lemuel Jones, the State expressed concern that it had very little information on Carpenter. And as with Lemuel Jones, the State claimed that it considered having Carpenter serve until Dr. Wright was struck. The only plausible reading of this statement is that once the State had removed Dr. Wright from the jury, it removed the other two African-Americans it had considered keeping, Jones and Carpenter, because they were African-American. The State did not know much about them, and the State did not want African-Americans to serve on the jury without the presence of Dr. Wright, an African-American whom the prosecutor repeatedly said was known to the State. Also similarly to Jones, the other reasons given by the State for striking Carpenter are unsupported by the record. They are that (1) the State had little information on her; (2) she appeared to be glaring at the prosecution; and (3) she was divorced. The State tied the first reason to Carpenter's race when it stated that it struck her because it did not have a lot of information on her and so felt it had to strike her after Dr. Wright was struck. The State's explanation that Carpenter was glaring at the State's attorneys is unsupported by the record. While it is possible that Carpenter was glaring, we have no way of determining the accuracy of that claim because the trial court did not respond to it. In Snyder v. Louisiana , the Supreme Court explained that the trial court must evaluate ... whether the juror's demeanor can credibly be said to have exhibited the basis for the strike attributed to the juror by the prosecutor... we have stated that in the absence of exceptional circumstances, we would defer to the trial court. Snyder, ___ U.S. ___, 128 S.Ct. at 1208, 170 L.Ed.2d 175. Having stated that deference, the Supreme Court declined in that case to credit the prosecutor's claim that the juror in question was struck because he was nervous, because [h]ere, however, the record does not show that the trial judge actually made a determination concerning [the juror]'s demeanor. Id. at 1209. Accordingly, the Court could not credit the demeanor explanation sufficiently to overcome the fact that the other asserted reason was pretextual. Id. at 1212. Similarly, in this case the State asserted Carpenter's demeanor as a reason for its strike. McGahee, 554 So.2d at 462. However, similarly to Snyder, the trial court made no response to the State's assertion of this reason, and we have no way of knowing whether the State's assertion that Carpenter was glaring was credible or not. Thus, this is weak support for the State's effort to rebut the significance of its apparently race-based reason for striking Carpenter. Finally, the Court of Criminal Appeals stated that the State's assertions that Mollerose Carpenter was struck ... because she was divorced (as was this appellant and his divorce from one of the victims in this case played a major role in this case) provided legitimate race-neutral reasons. McGahee, 554 So.2d at 462. The State never offered such a full explanation for its strike of Carpenter. Instead, the State said only, [s]he was divorced. McGahee, 554 So.2d at 460. While it is true that the defendant, McGahee, was divorced, it is also true that the victim was a divorced woman, thus creating an equal (or probably greater) likelihood that Carpenter, a divorced woman, would have been prone to identify with the victim, a divorced woman. If the stated reason does not hold up, its pretextual significance does not fade because a trial judge, or an appeals court, can imagine a reason that might not have been shown up as false. Miller-El v. Dretke, 545 U.S. at 252, 125 S.Ct. at 2332. The State asserted no reason why Carpenter's divorce would have made her more sympathetic to the defendant than to the State's case. The Court of Criminal Appeals' reasoning does not substitute for the State's lack of explanation. Thus, the State provided one apparently race-based reason for striking Carpenter, and its other reasons for striking Carpenter were weak. We need not decide whether the strike of Carpenter constituted a separate and additional violation of Batson; the fact that the State was concerned about leaving Carpenter, as well as Jones, as the sole African-American on the jury bolsters our conviction that Jones was removed from the jury as a result of intentional discrimination. Finally, we mention that the prosecutor made the following statement in his introduction to his post-trial proffer of explanations. First of all, we used information gathered from the jury list concerning ages, employment, race and general information gathered from that. While the State asserted that the prosecutor meant to refer in this statement only to the sort of facts which appear on the jury list, [21] this fact bolsters somewhat the foregoing strong evidence that the prosecutor did believe that race was a significant factor. In reviewing all relevant circumstances in this record, including the astonishing pattern resulting from the total exclusion of African-Americans in this county in which they comprised fifty-five percent and the strong evidence of race-based decision-making both generally and especially with respect to jurors Jones and Carpenter, we find that it blinks reality to deny that the State struck Jones, and perhaps Carpenter, because they were African-American. Miller-El v. Dretke, 545 U.S. at 266, 125 S.Ct. at 2340. The record in this case compels a finding that the State's use of a peremptory strike in this case to dismiss Jones constituted intentional discrimination, and violated McGahee's rights under the Equal Protection Clause and the clearly established law as determined by the Supreme Court in Batson. [22] Accordingly, the district court's order denying McGahee's federal habeas petition is REVERSED, and the case is REMANDED to the district court with instructions to issue the writ of habeas corpus conditioned upon the right of the State to retry McGahee. REVERSED and REMANDED.