Wilkerson v. Texas
| Decision Date | 16 October 1989 |
| Docket Number | No. 89-5072,89-5072 |
| Parties | Richard James WILKERSON, petitioner, v. TEXAS |
| Court | U.S. Supreme Court |
Petition for a writ of certiorari to the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas.
Denied.
Adhering to my view that the death penalty is in all circumstances cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, 231, 96 S.Ct. 2909, 2950, 2973, 49 L.Ed.2d 859 (1976) (MARSHALL, J., dissenting), I would grant the petition for certiorari and vacate the death sentence in this case. Even if I did not hold this view, I would grant the petition to determine whether a prosecutor's exercise of peremptory challenges based in part on racial considerations violates the Equal Protection Clause.
Richard Wilkerson, an Afro-American, was convicted of murder by an all-white jury and sentenced to death. During voir dire, the prosecution exercised 4 of its 12 peremptory challenges to remove all of the potential Afro-American jurors. After trial, while petitioner's case was pending on direct review, this Court held that the Equal Protection Clause "forbids the States to strike black veniremen on the assumption that they will be biased in a particular case simply because the defendant is black." Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 97, 106 S.Ct. 1712, 1723, 90 L.Ed.2d 69 (1986). Petitioner subsequently raised a Batson claim in a petition for habeas corpus filed in state court.
The trial court concluded that Wilkerson had made a prima facie showing of purposeful discrimination by the prosecution in the jury selection process. At the Batson hearing, one of the prosecutors who conducted voir dire conceded that race was a factor in his peremptory strike of an Afro-American juror:
Responding to questions concerning his peremptory strike of a different juror, the prosecutor indicated that he "thought perhaps [the juror] might make some identification I guess, with the defendant to some extent." Id., at 3-4. The questioning continued:
Finally, on redirect examination by the State, the same prosecutor stated that his perception that an Afro-American juror would extend sympathy to an Afro-American defendant was "[o]ne of the many considerations [for striking a particular juror] but nothing major about that." Id., at 76.
The trial court nonetheless concluded that the prosecutors "did not exercise peremptory challenges in a discriminatory manner to exclude venirepersons based upon racial considerations, nor did they, in any way, purposefully or deliberately deny jury participation to black persons because of race." Id., at 10. The court based this legal conclusion on several pages of factual findings that relate in detail the prosecution's race-neutral explanations for its peremptory challenges to the Afro-American venirepersons. Unaccountably, these findings do not mention, much less discuss, the prosecution's open admissions that race played a role in its decision to prevent the Afro-American members of the venire from serving on the petit jury. This omission in the state court's factual findings provides ample justification for this Court to dispense with the traditional deference, now codified by statute, that such findings are accorded on federal review. See 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(8) (1982 ed.) (presumption of correctness overcome if a federal court concludes that a state court's "factual determination[s] [are] not fairly supported by the record"). Accordingly, this case is properly characterized as one involving mixed prosecutorial mo- tives in that the decision to challenge the Afro-American jurors rested on both race-neutral considerations and race-conscious factors.
The state trial court's implicit legal conclusion—that the Constitution does not prohibit a prosecutor from striking a juror even when the decision is based in part on his "intuitive judgment [that the juror] would be partial to the defendant because of their shared race," Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S., at 97, 106 S.Ct., at 1723—cannot be squared with Batson's unqualified requirement that the state offer "a neutral explanation" for its peremptory challenge, id., at 98, 106 S.Ct., at 1723 (emphasis added). To be "neutral," the explanation must be based wholly on nonracial criteria.
The trial court seems to have transferred a legal standard formulated in other contexts to the Batson inquiry by requiring the defendant to show that the Afro-American venire-persons would not have been challenged "but for" the prosecution's impermissible assumptions about race. In some instances in which a defendant's actions were motivated by a mixture of permissible and impermissible factors, we have recognized as a defense to liability a showing that the challenged actions would have occurred even absent the improper consideration. See, e.g., Mt. Healthy City Bd. of Ed. v. Doyle, 429 U.S. 274, 285-287, 97 S.Ct. 568, 575-576, 50 L.Ed.2d 471 (1977) (). A "but for" test is inappropriate in the Batson inquiry, however, because of the special difficulties of proof that a court applying that standard to a prosecutor's peremptory-challenge decisions necessarily would encounter.
The "but for" standard requires the factfinder to address a counterfactual: whether a prosecutor would have struck the challenged Afro-American jurors if his decisions had not been clouded by impermissible racial considerations. Put another way, the question is whether the prosecutor would have struck the Afro-American jurors had they been white. To answer this question, the factfinder must decide whether the prosecutor's intuitive, racially neutral reservations about the challenged Afro-American jurors were in each case greater than his intuitive reservations about the white jurors whom he...
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