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| Supreme Court upholds Ohio policy on violent inmates, slams racial bias in juries |
| By Pittsburgh Post Gazette |
| Published: 06/14/2005 |
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The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday unanimously upheld the state of Ohio's revised policy for determining when especially dangerous inmates can be transferred to a "super-maximum security" prison in Youngstown, where they endure long periods of solitary confinement and little opportunity for exercise. But in upholding Ohio's revised policy, which two lower federal courts found inadequate, Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion made clear that prisoners earmarked for "supermax" status in Ohio and elsewhere have a constitutional right to be informed of the reasons for their reclassification and an opportunity to contest it. In other action yesterday, the justices set aside the death sentence of a Texas murderer in an opinion that marked the high court's second rebuff of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That 6-3 decision was one of two rulings yesterday in which the court reaffirmed that it was unconstitutional for prosecutors to challenge prospective jurors on the basis of race. Yesterday's decision in the "supermax" case frees the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction from a court order under which it had been providing prisoners not only with the protections required by the Supreme Court yesterday but also the right to call witnesses in contesting their transfer to the 500-bed "supermax" facility. Kennedy said letting inmates call witnesses in their defense could undermine prison security and lead to reprisals against prisoners who testified. Ohio will now be allowed to implement a revised policy for prisoner transfer that has been in legal limbo while the state appealed the lower-court rulings. That policy would replace Ohio's original transfer policy, which, according to Kennedy's majority opinion, involved "inconsistent and undefined" procedures that resulted in "haphazard" placement of inmates in cells where a light burns 24 hours a day and conversation between prisoners is impossible. In setting aside the death sentence of Texas death row inmate Thomas Joe Miller-El, the justices yesterday ruled 6-3 that Miller-El's rights were violated when prosecutors used peremptory challenges -- those which by tradition do not require an explanation -- to exclude 10 African Americans from the jury that tried Miller-El for the 1985 robbery-murder of a hotel employee in Dallas. In 2003, the Supreme Court overturned a ruling by the 5th Circuit that Miller-El couldn't file a writ of habeas corpus based on a claim that jury selection in his trial was tainted by racial discrimination. It returned the case to the 5th Circuit, which again found against Miller-El, a ruling overturned yesterday. Miller-El will now get a new trial. In his majority opinion, Justice David H. Souter said, "The prosecutors' chosen race-neutral reasons for the strikes do not hold up and are so far at odds with the evidence that pretext is the fair conclusion." Souter noted that prosecutors took their cues from a 20-year-old manual of tips on jury selection that contained racial stereotypes and "shuffled" the order in which prospective jurors would be interviewed to increase the chance that whites would be chosen. Souter was joined by Kennedy and Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote a dissenting opinion in which he said. "Miller-El has not established, much less established by clear and convincing evidence, that prosecutors racially discriminated in the selection of his jury." |
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