Death Row Racism - Louisiana Style

If you need another reason for abolishing the death penalty, take good ol' boy Jim Williams.

Jim is a prosecutor down in New Orleans who really gets into capital crime trials. He once told a reporter, "It got to the point where there was no thrill for me unless there was a chance for the death penalty."

Now consider the case of Allen Snyder, a black man currently awaiting execution. Tomorrow the US Supreme Court will decide whether Jim violated the condemned man's constitutional rights by removing all potential black jurors from his trial.

Allen Snyder had the misfortune of having his trial held in Jefferson parish. As the LA Times reports, that's not a great place for a black man at the best of times:

"Named for Thomas Jefferson, the parish is "familiar with racial divisions and appeals to race," noted veteran defense lawyer Stephen B. Bright in his Supreme Court brief on Snyder's behalf. David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was elected to the Legislature from the parish in 1989 as a Republican.

The parish is considered a particularly tough place to be a defendant in a criminal trial. In the mid-1990s, the Louisiana Supreme Court Task Force on Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts held a hearing where Denise LeBoeuf testified about her experiences as a public defender in Jefferson. "Sitting judges used the 'n-word' in conversation in the courtroom," she said.

At the end of the trial, Williams exhorted the all-white jury to give Snyder a death sentence because the case was "very, very similar" to the "most famous murder case" just a year earlier, in which former football star O.J. Simpson "got away with it."

Unbelievable. Only in Jim Crow America.