In July, a divided Eleventh Circuit panel ruled that Montgomery Assistant District Attorney Ellen Brooks violated Michael Sockwell's constitutional rights when she struck down 80% of the qualified Black jurors while striking only 22% of the qualified white jurors. Sockwell was convicted and sentenced to death for shooting a sheriff's deputy in the face for $100 in 1988, as part of a murder-for-hire plot initiated by the deputy's wife.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1986 in Batson v. Kentucky
that the 14th Amendment's equal protection clauses forbid unexplained strikes of potential jurors based on protected characteristics such as race, gender or national origin.Under Batson, a defendant must first point to signs that a strike was motivated by race or gender. The prosecutor must then offer a neutral explanation for the strike. The trial court must determine whether the defendant has carried the ultimate burden of demonstrating that discrimination motivated the exclusion of the potential juror.
During jury selection, Brooks struck eight of the 10 Black jurors from Sockwell's jury. She justified striking one of them, Eric Davis, for his vagueness about what he already knew about Sockwell's crime and the trial.
Davis said he had heard hearsay referencing a newspaper article about the deputy's killing. Two white women who were also potential jurors, Lisa Burch and Peggy McFarlin, also answered in vague terms that they had read or heard bits of information about the homicide in the news, but they were not struck.
Writing for the panel's majority, U.S. Circuit Judge Charles R. Wilson said the side-by-side comparison "reveals a substantial likelihood of race-based considerations in the exercise of those strikes." The majority also found that Brooks, who had a history of excluding Black jurors for racial reasons, had written in her notes that Davis was of the same race and age as Sockwell.
"The overwhelming evidence in this record compels a finding that Brooks' use of her peremptory strike to dismiss Davis violated Sockwell's rights under the equal protection clause and clearly established federal law under Batson," the panel's majority held.
The Eleventh Circuit panel decision marked a rare occasion in which a federal court displaces the factual and legal findings of a state court. A federal law, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, severely restricts whether and how federal courts can review state court convictions through the federal habeas process.
Sockwell's Batson claim was rejected at trial and in appeals to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals and the Alabama Supreme Court, where his conviction was affirmed, before the Eleventh Circuit granted him habeas relief in the form of a new trial.
In a dissenting opinion, U.S. Circuit Judge Robert J. Luck called the majority's reasoning "flawed" and found that Davis's answers during jury selection were more vague and inconsistent compared those the white jurors gave. Judge Luck said federal law compelled the judges to defer to the state court's finding and that habeas relief should be granted only in "extreme" cases.
In a petition filed in November, Alabama told the justices that the Eleventh Circuit violated the AEDPA by rejecting the trial court's application of the Batson ruling and the higher courts' determinations in Sockwell's case. In urging the Supreme Court to reverse the panel's ruling, the state said Sockwell's "factual guilt" should count against federal habeas relief.
"Sockwell's victory below does nothing to change the facts of his crime," the petition said. "In what sense would vacating this man's conviction be equitable?"
The justices, as is customary, did not say why they rejected the petition.
In December, the U.S. Supreme Court granted review in Pitchford v. Cain, another capital case centering on the racially discriminatory strike of jurors.
That case, which will be heard on March 31, focuses on whether the Mississippi Supreme Court was correct in finding that Terry Pitchford, a Black man convicted of murder, had waived his rights to challenge a prosecutor's purportedly "race-neutral reasons" for using four of his 12 peremptory strikes to remove four Black prospective jurors.
That prosecutor, Doug Evans, had been at the center of another constitutional challenge that reached the high court. In 2019, in Flowers v. Mississippi, the high court found that Evans had used peremptory strikes in another case to remove 41 of 42 Black prospective jurors for no reason other than their race.
Sockwell is represented by Michael Evan Rayfield of Shook Hardy & Bacon LLP.
Alabama Department of Corrections Commssioner John Q. Hamm is represented by Robert Michael Overing of the Alabama Attorney General's Office.
The case is Hamm v. Sockwell, case number 25-558, in the Supreme Court of the United States.
--Editing by Drashti Mehta.