Successful Batson Challenge Reveals Racial Discrimination in Harris County Jury Selection
By: Houston Criminal Defense Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
Assistant District Attorneys Mark Donnelly and Rifian Newaz are considered seasoned, professional prosecutors by their colleagues in the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. Many Harris County defense attorneys also hold the prosecutors in high professional esteem. In fact, we recently paid tribute to ADA Donnelly for his recent professional efforts to undo the tragic wrong done to Ricardo Rachell who was wrongfully convicted and who spent six years in prison for the aggravated sexual assault of a child.
But this level of professional respect did not spare the two prosecutors from the reform rod of newly-elected District Attorney Pat Lykos. Determined to remove the District Attorney’s Office from the ugly specter of corruption, mismanagement, and racism that characterized the prosecutor’s office under her predecessor, Charles “Chuck” Rosenthal, DA Lykos took the recent extraordinary action of publicly chastising and reprimanding Donnelly and Newaz for their handling of jury selection in the case of Ricky Whitfield, a black defendant charged with murder.
The two prosecutors used seven of their 10 jury strikes to remove seven blacks from the jury pool. The end result was an all-white jury. This jury result did not set well—and rightly so—with Whitfield’s attorneys, Jacquelyn Carpenter and Eric Davis. They promptly filed a Batson motion under the Supreme Court decision in Batson v. Kentucky that imposed a three-step evaluation test on a trial judge to be utilized in determining whether a prosecutor’s use of jury strikes constitutes intentional racial discrimination.
According to the Houston Chronicle (March 27, 2009), Donnelly and Newaz responded to the Batson motion by telling District Judge Jeannine Barr that the black prospective jurors were eliminated because they were “indecisive about whether the criminal justice system should punish or rehabilitate [and] they didn’t want indecision in the jury room,” reported the Chronicle. (more…)
