• Eight veteran prosecutors, among them former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to “recognize, and refuse to condone, the blatant illegality of the prosecutorial misconduct” that led to a Georgia death row inmate’s sentence. The group contend in an amicus brief that Georgia prosecutors’ conduct in the 1987 trial of Timothy Foster was “at odds with the values and responsibilities that prosecutors are bound to uphold.”
The conduct in question is the apparently discriminatory use of strikes during jury selection at Foster’s trial “to ensure that a black defendant accused of a crime against a white victim would face an all-white jury.” The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Batson v. Kentucky the year before Foster was convicted of the murder of an elderly white woman barred the practice.
