Keith Tharpe, once an inmate on Georgia’s death row, died in 2020 of natural causes before he could be executed.
Tharpe, who was convicted of murder in 1991, spent years appealing his death sentence believing he was on death row because of racial bias on the jury.
A few years after the conviction in interviews with Tharpe’s attorneys, one juror, Barney Gattie, said Tharpe “wasn’t in the ‘good’ Black folks category” and deserved to die.
Gattie, who is white, later claimed to be drunk when he made that statement.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider Tharpe’s final appeal, not because it lacked merit but because of procedural barriers. So he remained at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Butts County, where the state houses prisoners sentenced to death.
A Gallup poll conducted last year found that 53% of Americans support the death penalty for convicted murderers, the lowest level of support since the early 1970s. No matter your feelings on the death penalty, we should at least agree that if it exists, the process of sentencing someone to die should be fair.
Our court system relies on a jury of our peers to enforce criminal law. But new research from the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative confirms that all too often, we uphold the idea that a “good jury” is synonymous with one that consists primarily of white men.
“In Alabama, African Americans are one-quarter of the people who live here but almost half the people on death row,” said study author Jennifer Rae Taylor, a senior attorney and senior writer for EJI. “The additional information that over half the people on our death row were convicted by a jury where African Americans were underrepresented … adds additional reasons to be concerned about a system that wants to execute people based on those outcomes.”
Taylor said she hopes the report can help people who aren’t judges, attorneys or lawmakers understand an issue they might not be aware of and push them to hold local officials accountable. Many courts don’t consistently record racial demographics of potential jurors or of those who are selected to the final jury.
In addition, many of us who are summoned to serve on juries are not excited about it. Rather than view jury duty as something to avoid, we should view it as an opportunity to ensure the system is fair, Taylor said.
In the years before a Supreme Court ruling prohibited jurors from being disqualified based on race, prosecutors in Texas received handbooks explicitly advising them to avoid adding anyone of a racial minority to the jury, but specifically Jewish, Black, Italian and Mexican people — no matter how well educated or wealthy they may be.
Even after the 1986 ruling which also set a formal process for trial courts to use during jury selection to determine if lawyers were illegally excluding potential jurors, discrimination in jury selection has persisted well into the 21st century.
In 2011, prosecutors in North Carolina attended training sessions to learn how to strike Black jurors without triggering scrutiny.
In 2016, California prosecutors were given 30 pages of “race neutral” justifications to use when striking people of color from the jury.
These attempts to keep certain members of society from serving as jurors are more than a violation of civil rights. The practice promotes the idea that one’s lived experience — if it is not the right lived experience — renders them incapable of remaining impartial.
“It is always the case that a person is not supposed to participate in a jury if they come into a case already having a set opinion and aren’t open to hearing evidence and talking to others on a jury to come to an answer,” said Taylor. “But being a Black person and coming into a case already aware of how race impacts our lives is not a deficit of participating on a jury.”
Taylor reports that Samuel Sommers, a professor at Tufts University and author of several seminal studies exploring the impact of racial diversity on jury decision-making, concluded that in many circumstances diverse juries are more competent than homogenous ones.
When a jury is diverse, there is more time spent deliberating, fewer errors are made and the process can result in fairer trials for anyone who is convicted of a crime, regardless of that person’s race.
It is ironic then, that in October, to gain a new trial for the white men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery, who was a Black man, defense attorneys questioned the impartiality of the only Black juror.
In a county that is 25% Black, defense attorneys struck eight other Black panelists as the final jury was selected. That’s not quite a jury of one’s peers.
The three men were accused of chasing Arbery through a subdivision in 2020, with one of them killing him at close range with a shotgun. Two of the men were sentenced to life without parole and one has the possibility of parole.
Tharpe and the men who killed Arbery had different cases and different outcomes, but both highlight racial bias in the courtroom — and how much more needs to be done.
Read more on the Real Life blog (AJC.com/opinion/real-life-blog), find Nedra on Facebook (facebook.com/AJCRealLifeColumn) and X (@nrhoneajc) or email her at nedra.rhone@ajc.com.
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