SCOTUS to focus again on race and the death penalty

Though the Baze lethal injection case is the most consequential death penalty case coming before the Supreme Court this term, the Snyder case to be argued before the Justices tomorrow is sure to generate a lot of buzz about racial realities in the application of capital punishment.  Helpfully, this article today's Los Angeles Times gets the discussion off to a rousing start.  The article is headlined, "Jury under justices' scrutiny; The Supreme Court will hear a Louisiana case in which a black man was sentenced to die after all blacks were kept off the panel."  But the start of the story reveals that it is really a prosecutor coming under scrutiny in Snyder:

Jim Williams had a reputation as a highly skilled, tenacious prosecutor -- maybe even a little bloodthirsty. After scoring convictions in dozens of murder cases, he told a reporter: "It got to the point where there was no thrill for me unless there was a chance for the death penalty."

In the mid-'90s, Williams posed for Esquire magazine standing behind a miniature electric chair with mug shots of five African American men he sent to death row. Since then, two of the defendants have been exonerated, two had their sentences commuted to life because of misconduct by Williams, and the fifth won a retrial after an appeals court overturned the verdict.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is to review another case in which Williams obtained a death sentence against a black man.  The key question is whether Williams violated Allen Snyder's constitutional rights by removing all the potential black jurors at the start of his 1996 trial. 

The Supreme Court's decision is expected to affect not only whether death-row inmate Snyder lives or dies but also how courts around the country weigh claims of unlawful racial discrimination during jury selection.  At the end of the trial, Williams exhorted the all-white jury to give Snyder a death sentence because the case was "very, very similar" to the "most famous murder case" just a year earlier, in which former football star O.J. Simpson "got away with it."

For those interested in more background on the appellate particulars in Snyder v. Louisiana (06-10119), the folks doing SCOTUSwiki have this extended entry on the case.