WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court cast doubt Tuesday on the actions of a prosecutor who called a Louisiana murder trial his “O.J. Simpson case” and kept blacks off the jury.
Skeptical justices considered whether prosecutor Jim Williams improperly excluded blacks from the jury that convicted Allen Snyder of killing his estranged wife’s companion. Snyder is black and the jurors were white.
The trial took place in August 1996, less than a year after Simpson was acquitted of killing his ex-wife and a male friend of hers. Williams made repeated public references to the Snyder case as his “O.J. Simpson case.” In his final remarks before jurors, Williams said the case reminded him of Simpson’s, although he didn’t use Simpson’s name.
“The perpetrator in that case got away with it,” Williams said, after the trial judge overruled a defense objection.
During jury selection in the trial, Williams disqualified all five blacks in the pool of prospective jurors.
Stephen Bright, Snyder’s lawyer, focused on two blacks who answered questions in the same way as whites in the jury pool. But while the whites were questioned extensively, the blacks were simply disqualified by the prosecutor.
“Racial prejudice infected the selection of the jury,” Bright argued Tuesday.
Snyder was convicted of first-degree murder in Jefferson Parish, just outside New Orleans, in August 1996. He was found guilty of repeatedly slashing his estranged wife, Mary Snyder, and a man, Harold Wilson, with a knife when he found them in a car outside her mother’s home in August 1995. His wife survived, but Wilson died.
Bright pointed out that the crime in the Snyder case occurred months before the Simpson verdict. He said the lesson Williams learned from watching the Simpson case, in which a jury with whites and blacks on it acquitted the former football star, was clear. “You don’t let blacks on the jury,” Bright said.
A decision is expected by summer.
