Supreme Court rebukes Texas again on the death penalty

It's almost a weekly occurence. They keep messing with Texas. First they say you can't kill the retarded, then they say you can't kill juveniles. Now they say you can't intentionally strike all the blacks out of the jury pool so you can get a white jury to convict a black defendant!

Now wonder DeLay and Cornyn are so angry with the federal judiciary. Story excerpts below. Two scary things to think about: 1) Though the US Supreme Court overturned the conviction 6-3, the US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it. That bastard court is about to get even worse with the addition of Priscilla Owen (she essentially kills people herself). 2) Clarence Thomas voted in the minority on this one. Not suprising really, but c'mon, Clarence, you really wonder why Black people don't like you when you just said it was OK for Dallas County prosecutors to stack the deck in court to try to kill a black defendant?

Supreme Court Overturns Death Row Conviction in Texas

The Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a black death row inmate who said Texas prosecutors unfairly stacked his jury with whites, issuing a harsh rebuke to the state that executes more people than any other.

[...]

Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, Texas has executed over one-third of the more than 900 people put to death in the United States.

Justices last year issued stinging reversals in three cases involving Texas death penalty convictions on various grounds, a striking number for a conservative-leaning court that generally favors capital punishment. All the cases involved black defendants.

Miller-El contends that Dallas County prosecutors had a long history of excluding blacks from juries and pointed to training manuals that were distributed to prosecutors from the 1960s into the early 1980s. The manuals advised prosecutors to remove blacks or Jews from death penalty juries on the theory that those groups would be more sympathetic to criminal defendants.