Earlier this week, the Supreme Court debated the issue of racial discrimination in jury selection. The argument stemmed from a Georgia case in which an all-white jury convicted Timothy Foster, a black man, of murdering an elderly white woman and then sentenced him to death. The killing happened nearly three decades ago, but the defense lawyers didn’t obtain the prosecution’s notes until 2006 through an open-records request. Those notes showed what Foster’s lead attorney characterized as “an arsenal of smoking guns” with regards to evidence of racial discrimination.
Those kinds of disparities weren’t unusual, wrote Bogira:
