Legal News

Ninth Circuit Gets Another Dressing-Down from High Court

By Ashby Jones

These are rough and tumble times for the Ninth Circuit, which, like an unruly child, has been disciplined in an increasing variety of ways by its disapproving superiors.

The latest came in the form of a succinct per curiam Supreme Court opinion, handed down Monday, which reversed a Ninth Circuit ruling that a prosecutor acted unconstitutionally when he struck two black jurors from a criminal jury.

The prosecutor gave reasons for dismissing the jurors, explaining that one was a social worker and that he didn’t “like to keep social workers.” The other, he explained, appeared to have animus toward police officers in the wake of a series of earlier events.

The defendant, who was convicted for attacking a 72-year-old woman in his apartment building, challenged his conviction. He had no luck at the state level, and filed a habeas claim in the federal court. The lower court dismissed his claim, but the Ninth Circuit granted it in a manner that the U.S. Supreme Court found wholly unconvincing.

The court wrote:

The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed in a three-paragraph unpublished memorandum opinion. In so doing, the court did not discuss any specific facts or mention the reasoning of the other three courts that had rejected Jackson's claim. Instead, after setting forth the basic background legal principles in the first two paragraphs, the Court of Appeals offered a one-sentence conclusory explanation for its decision:

‘The prosecutor's proffered race-neutral bases for peremptorily striking the two African-American jurors were not sufficient to counter the evidence of purposeful discrimination in light of the fact that two out of three prospective African-American jurors were stricken, and the record reflected different treatment of comparably situated jurors.”

The Supreme Court dispatched with the ruling in kind, writing: “That decision is as inexplicable as it is unexplained. It is reversed.”

Ouch.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 21, 2011 (boomark / email).