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Snyder V. Georgia Supreme Court Case For The Murder Of Queen White

1109 Words5 Pages

In 1986, Timothy Foster was on trial for the murder of Queen White, a white woman. In court cases, the prosecution is given the ability to eliminate jurors that they feel are less suited for the case. These are called peremptory challenges. The prosecution put four peremptory challenges on the four prospective black jurors. The prosecution claimed that the strikes were ‘race-neutral', meaning that they struck the jurors for reasons other than their race. The Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the reasons for the strikes were related enough to the case and were not discriminatory. Contrary to this ruling, the juror questionnaires that helped the prosecution determine who to strike had the race of the jurors circled. The prosecution in their notes also identified the jurors that they wished to strike as Black#1, Black#2, and Black#3, referring to the jurors' race, and ordering them based on best to worst, if they had to be used. Foster appealed to the …show more content…

Louisiana is another precedent for this current case. Allen Snyder, a black man, was on trial for capital murder in a Louisiana court. The prosecutor used peremptory strikes to dismiss the five African Americans on the jury panel. This resulted in Snyder being tried by an all white jury. The court found him guilty and sentenced the death penalty. The defense argued that the peremptory strikes were based off of race. Snyder appealed to the Supreme Court of Louisiana, which found that the judge did not act unreasonably in dismissing the case as a Batson violation. This case parallels the case at hand. The prosecutor used their peremptory strikes to remove the black jurors for pretext reasons, not justifiable ones. In Foster’s case, the court used reasons such as the jurors being too close in age to the defendant, Foster, to strike a prospective juror. In reality, the prospective juror in question was twenty years older than Foster, and white prospective jurors were selected that were closer in

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