Tommy Lee Walker, a Black man, was just 19 years old when he was arrested for the 1953 rape and murder of Venice Parker, a white woman in Dallas. Walker’s wrongful conviction unfolded in the cauldron of racial panic in segregated Dallas, where police and newspapers had spent a year fueling fears of a so-called “Negro prowler”, alleged to be exposing himself and sexually assaulting white woman. At the height of racialized media frenzy, Parker was raped and murdered near the Dallas airport. Though no physical evidence connected Walker to the murder and he presented extensive alibi evidence, he was convicted by an all-white jury, and the State of Texas executed him less than three years later. But this January, after nearly 70 years, the Dallas County Commissioners Court ruled that he had been wrongly executed and that Walker had been innocent all along.
The all-white jury’s role in Walker’s wrongful conviction and execution and his recent posthumous exoneration illustrate why the 1986 Supreme Court ruling of Batson v. Kentucky, which prevents prosecutors from rejecting potential jurors based on race, was necessary.
“None of the Black alibi witnesses were credited by the all-white jury. If Batson had existed, maybe Tommy Lee Walker lives. It’s as simple as that,” said Chris Fabricant, an Innocence Project attorney and director of strategic litigation. Fabricant and Margaret A. Burnham, director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) at Northeastern University School of Law, represented Edward Smith, Walker’s son, in his father’s innocence case.
Research shows that diverse juries have higher quality deliberations, deliberate longer, and make fewer factual errors in evaluating evidence. Advocates for justice celebrated the Batson decision as a long-overdue correction to centuries of racial exclusion in American courtroo
“Participating in jury service is such an important civic duty. This is the chance to have a direct impact on your community and systematically excluding Black people directly affects the outcome of legal cases,” said Amanda Wallwin, an Innocence Project state policy advocate.
Batson did not exist during Walker’s lifetime. But in the 40 years since the historic Supreme Court ruling, racially biased juries have continued to influence wrongful conviction cases. Today, Batson works better in theory than in practice. While the ruling requires prosecutors and defense counsel to offer race-neutral explanations for excluding jurors of color, it does not eliminate other practices that enable racially biased jury selection nationwide.
In Mississippi, researchers found that from 1992 to 2017 more than half of the jurors struck by judges were Black. In Louisiana, between 2009 and 2017, prosecutors used nearly 60% of their peremptory strikes — the legal right by litigants to reject potential jurors without giving a reason — against Black prospective jurors, even though Black residents made up roughly one-third of the eligible jury pool. A California study reviewing appellate cases from 2006 to 2018 found that prosecutors struck potential jurors who were Black in nearly 75% of the cases examined, while striking white potential jurors at only 0.4%.
The cases of Innocence Project clients like Marcellus Williams illustrate how racially biased jury selection has remained embedded in modern courtrooms and continues to impede justices, even in capital cases — where the stakes are literally life and death.
Williams was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in Missouri for the 1998 murder of journalist Felicia Gayle. During jury selection, prosecutors struck Black prospective jurors using justifications later challenged as racially motivated — including one prosecutor’s admission that part of the reason he removed one juror was because he “looked like [ Williams’] brother.” The selected jury lacked racial diversity, a factor that undermined the fairness of a case already marked by serious concerns of flawed evidence. The Innocence Project fought for years to secure Williams’ exoneration. The State of Missouri executed Williams on Sept. 24, 2024, but he maintained his innocence until the end.
But Williams’ case is far from an isolated incident. A study of death penalty trials in Alabama since 1989 found that nearly 19% were decided by all-white juries, and almost 40% had one or no Black jurors, despite Black people representing more than 30% of the population in those counties.
In another case similarly impacted by a racially biased jury, Pervis Payne, a Black man with intellectual disabilities, was sentenced to death for a 1987 double homicide in Tennessee. His trial was decided by a predominantly white jury in Shelby County. Payne’s conviction was later called into question based on evidence of racial bias and prosecutorial misconduct. During the trial, the prosecution emphasized the victim’s “white skin” in descriptions of her body. Simultaneously, they depicted Payne as an aggressive, hypersexual Black man with a history of drug use. His execution was ultimately halted and his sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
These cases, that span decades, reveal that jury selection remains one of the most powerful mechanisms through which racial bias influences who is convicted and who is sent to death row in the post-Batson era.
Several states have begun to implement reforms that reflect the Batson ruling, including Arizona’s Supreme Court — which has eliminated peremptory strikes altogether. The Washington State Supreme Court and California Legislature each adopted stronger rules that limit peremptory strikes and prohibit many of the justifications historically used to exclude non-white jurors. Both states allow judges to deny peremptory strikes if an “objective observer” could view it as racially motivated.
New York is currently weighing similar legislation. New York Senate Bill 2491, which the Innocence Project supports, would see the state adopt similar reforms by mandating that trial courts deny peremptory strikes that a “reasonable person” could view as being based on a juror’s protected characteristics, like race.
“We gave the courts 40 years to implement Batson and to make it work for the judicial system, and it really hasn’t. At this point it’s on state legislatures to take the intent of Batson and make sure that the courts are banning the use of discriminatory factors in jury selection,” Wallwin said.
Republished courtesy of Innocence Project