Prosecutor removed Black jurors, SC man sentenced to die Friday tells US Supreme Court
Written by Black Hot Fire Network on October 28, 2024
Attorneys for a South Carolina man scheduled to be executed Friday have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to grant an emergency stay of execution.
Richard Moore is scheduled to die by lethal injection Nov. 1 in the state death chamber at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina. Moore was convicted of shooting and killing store clerk James Mahoney during an armed robbery gone wrong.
Moore, who was sentenced to death in 2001, has a pending claim before the Supreme Court alleging that prosecutors prevented all of the potential Black jurors from serving on his case.
He has asked the nation’s highest court to stay his execution while the justices review his claim that prosecutors used their peremptory strikes to remove potential Black jurors in order to secure an all-white or nearly all-white jury.
“An all-white jury, especially one where all qualified Black prospective jurors were removed by the State, casts serious doubt on the integrity of a capital trial and undermines the public confidence in the criminal justice system,” wrote Moore’s attorneys, Lindsey Vann and John Blume.
During jury selection, defense attorneys and prosecutors have the opportunity to dismiss or “strike” jurors. While attorneys do not need to give a reason for using these strikes, they are not allowed to strike jurors because of their race under a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Batson v. Kentucky.
But the case law that protects defendants from being convicted by racially biased juries are limited, say experts. So long as a lawyer can offer a “race-neutral” reason for why a potential juror was stricken, it will likely be accepted by a court, said Stephen Bright, a professor at Yale Law School and former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, who has argued death penalty cases before the Supreme Court.
At Moore’s murder trial in 2001, Spartanburg Solicitor Trey Gowdy struck two qualified potential Black jurors. When Moore’s attorneys attempted to challenge these strikes in what’s known as a “Batson claim,” the reasons Gowdy gave for striking those jurors could also have been applied to white jurors, Moore’s attorneys say.
But Judge Gary Clary ruled against Moore’s attorneys at the time, finding that Gowdy’s reasons for striking the jurors was sufficiently race neutral.
As a result, the final jury was all or nearly all-white. Some court documents describe one juror as being Hispanic while he listed as white in other documents.
Moore will be the second person executed in South Carolina since 2011, when the state halted execution when they ran out of the drugs needed to perform the lethal injection.
