Our Mr. Brooks: SCOTUS Rules on La. Batson Case

Posted in Criminal on Wednesday March 19 2008 @ 8:54am

If we learned anything in our decade of court-helping, it is that nothing that happens in Louisiana surprises us.

Something bubbles beneath the swampiness there, mingling with the Napoleonic Code, the parish system, Cajunisms, and Mardi Gras madness to create a legal landscape unlike any other.

We once spoke with an official there who claimed that the state's law on crawdad theft was the only property crime anywhere that lacked an actus reus, meaning that just wishing you could get your mitts on someone else's mini lobsters was enough.

We've also heard that the practice of posting information about sex offenders on the state website led to a new kind of online shopping never anticipated by eBay: sort of a FaceBook for hos. (The for-profit version of which, we're certain, is being invented as we write.)

So when we heard that a prosecutor told an all-white capital jury that this was their chance to remedy the O.J. travesty, well, we were shocked and not so shocked when the trial court left this statement and the jury composition alone.

Now the SCOTUS has ruled that the trial judge in that case committed clear error by rejecting a Batson challenge with regard to one (there were two in question) black juror.

Narrow grounds, to be sure, but useful to some extent for Batson-watchers. Alito called the trial court's role "pivotal," as it is ground zero in these cases, and thus in the best position "to evaluate the demeanor of the prosecutor exercising the challenge and the juror being excluded."

For once, the Court did not buy the explanation (that the prospective juror had other obligations and would be too busy to serve). It's as Munsterman says, "everybody likes jury duty, just not today!" Surely others in the room had places to go and people to meet.

Mr. Brooks, a student and student teacher, gave the court his professor's contact information. The court followed up and arranged for him to make up time during the semester. Thus, the prosecutor's reasoning that Mr. Brooks would try to hurry through deliberations was too speculative. The Court used words such as "implausible," and compared Brooks's situation to other similarly- (or presumably worse-off) situated members of the pool.

The prosecution's other reason, that the prospective juror looked nervous, was likewise not good enough to get voted off Batson island. At this point, the trial court should have evaluated the challenge by making a determination regarding the prospective juror's demeanor (was he really nervous?). Here, no such finding was made, so the Court "cannot presume that the trial judge credited the prosecutor's assertion that Mr. Brooks was nervous."

The question of whether the racial remarks were improper was not answered by the opinion, written by Justice Alito. Nor is it clear what happened to the other black juror.

Justices Scalia and Thomas refused to "second-guess the fact-based determinations of the Louisiana courts as to the reasons for a prosecutor's decision to strike two jurors." They would have deferred to the trial court's "expertise in making credibility determinations and its firsthand knowledge of the voir dire exchange" to affirm.

Interesting that the trial court's ground's eye view is relied on by both the majority and the dissent. On the one hand, Justice Alito and company say "shoulda known better," trial court, and fixed the situation. The Dissenting Duo say that *because* the trial court knows best, let 'em be.

The case is Snyder v. Louisiana (06-101119).

See Court Finds Flaws in La. Jury Choice, Lyle Denniston, SCOTUSblog (March 19, 2008).

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