In Flowers v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court voted 7-2 to overturn the conviction and death sentence in the sixth murder trial of Curtis Flowers, finding that the prosecutor had engaged in misconduct by discriminating against black people in jury selection.
Penn Law faculty members Dorothy Roberts, the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, and John Hollway, associate dean and executive director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice provide their commentary on the decision.
“The Court’s requirement that defendants prove prosecutors’ discriminatory motivation discounts the systematic role all-white juries have played since the slavery era,” says Roberts, “…without breaking any ‘new legal ground’ to end the racist rigging of death penalty cases.” Hollway goes on to say that because the Court “expressly limits its holdings to the unique procedural context of this case … weakens the institution of the peremptory challenge, by definition a challenge for which no reason need be given.”
Read more at Penn Law News.
