Court Opinion

ID: 9492482
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:42:17.550265+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:19.704105
License: Public Domain

MICHAEL DALY HAWKINS, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
Judge Trott quite properly applies the law of the case in affirming the district court’s denial of habeas relief and, for that reason, I join in the result. However, a brief comment is in order. If one is blind to the racial makeup of a particular juror, as Batson and its progeny seem to require, then Edward Robertson was, from everything the record tells us, the kind of juror a prosecutor would ordinarily love to see serve, especially in an armed robbery ease. He spoke eloquently when questioned. He had prior jury service. Both he and his sister had been victims of theft crimes and he believed in stricter gun control. Yet the prosecutor chose to exercise a peremptory challenge to prevent him from serving as a trial juror.
Unfortunately, we will never know the prosecutor’s reason for striking Mr. Robertson because she was never required to give one. Rather, the trial court found that Tolbert’s counsel, who made a timely and proper Batson-Wheeler objection, had not made out a prima facie case of discrim*990inatory challenge by the prosecution. The prosecutor may have had a perfectly sensible and race-neutral explanation for striking Mr. Robertson, but because the trial court found a reason where none was offered, we will never know.
We do know that, during the jury selection process, Mr. Robertson asked to approach the bench and inquire why — in a case with two African-American men on trial — no questions about race were being asked in the jury selection process. The trial court offered an explanation. Mr. Robertson accepted it and acknowledged he could still be a fair and impartial juror. Like the prosecutor’s explanation for striking him, we will never know why he asked these questions at sidebar. He may have been anxious to state affirmatively that he could judge another African-American fairly; he may have wanted other jurors to be asked whether they could rely on an identification of a person of a different race. But there was nothing in his having spoken up that would suggest he could not be a fair and impartial juror.
On a fairly regular basis, we read of prisoners being released when scientific tests show they could not have committed the crime of which they were convicted. See, e.g., Naftali Bendavid, For Innocent, DNA Proving Sturdy Ally In Five Years, The Innocence Project Has Helped Free 32 Convicts Through DNA Tests, Chicago Tribune, Oct. 27, 1997, at 1; Innocence Project Uses DNA Testing To Exonerate Some Inmates, The Group Highlights Advances In Technology, St. Louis Posb-Dis-patch, Nov. 9, 1997, at C-12; Steve Mills and Ken Armstrong, Yet Another Death Row Inmate Cleared, Chicago Tribune, May 18, 1999, at 1. Many of these prisoners are of African-American descent. See, e.g., David Firestone, DNA Test Frees Accused Rapist After 16 Years In Georgia Prison, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), June 16, 1999, at 19A. How many jurors of their own race were struck from the juries that convicted these individuals is not normally reported upon. We do know that the ideal of Batson has lost considerable currency in the trenches of criminal trials.1 Maybe, just maybe, some of those juries that convicted some of those now known to have been innocent could have used a few more jurors like Edward Robertson.

. See, e.g., Carter Center Symposium On The Death Penalty-July 24, 1997, 14 Ga. St. U.L.Rev. 329, 367-74 (1998); Sheri Lynn Johnson, Black Innocence and The White Jury, 83 Mich. L.Rev. 1611 (1985); Jere W. Morehead, When A Peremptory Challenge Is No Longer Peremptory: Batson’s Unfortunate Failure To Eradicate Invidious Discrimination From Jury Selection, 43 DePaul L.Rev. 625, 633-36 (1994).