Court Hears La. Jury Bias Case
Prosecutor in '95 Trial Referenced O.J. Simpson, Excluded Blacks

By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Late in the Louisiana night, Allen Snyder surprised his estranged wife and her lover as they returned from a date, viciously attacking them with a knife, killing him. Snyder retreated to his home and called police in a suicidal funk.

The 1995 killings reminded Jefferson Parish prosecutor James Williams, whose specialty was securing the death penalty for murderers, of another slaying. Snyder, he told reporters, is "my O.J. Simpson case."

But he did not limit his remarks to reporters. And the Supreme Court held a lively session yesterday to determine whether Williams first improperly excluded blacks from the jury that heard the case of Snyder, who is African American, and then appealed to racial prejudice by reminding jurors of the defendant in "the most famous murder case" whose trial had ended 10 months earlier.

"He got away with it," Williams warned.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that prosecutors could not use their jury selection prerogatives to exclude potential jurors simply because of their race. In 2005, it reinforced the message by instructing courts to take a wide look at racial motivation in determining proper jury selection.

The Louisiana Supreme Court has twice upheld Snyder's conviction and sentence, approving the trial judge's role in allowing prosecutor Williams to strike all five potential black jurors in seating an all-white panel.

The justices yesterday also took an extraordinarily close examination of the details of the case, including which jurors were struck from the panel and which were allowed to serve. At first, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Antonin Scalia seemed to agree that there were reasons for striking the African Americans other than race.

Besides, Scalia said, courts should defer to the trial judge, who is "in a much better position to decide those matters."

But Snyder's lawyer, Stephen B. Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, said prosecutors did not subject white and black potential jurors to the same lines of questioning and urged the justices to look at the proceedings in their entirety.

"When you consider all those factors together, nothing answers the question of, or explains them, as well as race," Bright said.

And then other justices began to question whether they could rely on the trial judge's performance.

"The judge was quite passive. . . . Was the judge, in fact, present throughout the entire voir dire?" asked Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, referring to the questioning of potential jurors.

And Justice David H. Souter seemed astounded by the trial judge's reasoning that Williams was not making a racial appeal when referring to the Simpson case because, the judge said, Williams did not mention that both Simpson and Snyder are black.

"Now, that is not a critical mind at work, is it?" Souter dryly asked Louisiana Assistant Attorney General Terry M. Boudreaux.

"I would suppose not, your honor," Boudreaux replied.

Williams, a controversial figure who once posed for Esquire magazine with a model of an electric chair adorned with the photos of men he sent to death row, never specifically mentioned Simpson's name as the jury deliberated whether Snyder deserved life in prison or death. But his reference to a defendant in a white Ford Bronco and the most famous murder case were unmistakable.

In response to a question from Justice John Paul Stevens about the relevance of the Simpson reference, Bright called it "the most racially polarizing case in the country."

Scalia said maybe the prosecutor was simply referring to the similarities of the cases -- but the justice incorrectly convicted Simpson and misstated the Snyder case when he said it was "also a case in which a man killed his wife with a knife."

Boudreaux agreed that the reference to Simpson was "not an appeal to race, but it was an appeal to what was a historical fact."

But Boudreaux had been stopped earlier by a question from Roberts.

"Do you think the prosecutor would have made the analogy if there had been a black juror on the jury?"

There was silence in the court during Boudreaux's long pause. "I think he would have, your honor," Boudreaux finally said.

The justices yesterday also returned their first opinions of the term, both unanimously. They ruled for a railroad company in a dispute over property taxes and upheld an enhanced sentence for a man under the federal Armed Career Criminal Act.

The cases are CSX Transportation v. State Board of Equalization and Logan v. U.S.