Supreme Court keeps Texas inmate on death row despite objections from bench

Texas inmate James Broadnax will remain on death row without a new trial after the Supreme Court denied his petition Monday.

In a new order list, the court said it was declining to hear Broadnax vs. Texas, despite objections from Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. They both said they “would reverse the judgment” of the state’s highest criminal court, the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals.

Broadnax, a Black man, was convicted of capital murder in 2009 for the fatal shooting of Stephen Swan and Matthew Butler, two Christian music producers. He was sentenced to death by a nearly all-white jury in Dallas when he was 20. Broadnax filed a petition to the Supreme Court in October, saying that the trial violated his constitutional right to a jury without racial bias.

During jury selection in Broadnax’s case, the prosecution used nearly half of its peremptory strikes to remove all seven Black prospective jurors from the pool. One was eventually reseated after the trial judge granted Broadnax’s challenge, citing “the fact that there are no African American jurors on this jury and there was a disproportionate number of African Americans who were struck.”

In 1986, the Supreme Court decided Batson vs. Kentucky. It held that prosecutors who exclude qualified jurors due to their race were in violation of the equal protection clause under the 14th Amendment.

As a result of Monday’s decision, Broadnax will remain on death row.

Alex Badas is a professor specializing in judicial politics at the University of Houston. He told Newsweek that, if the Supreme Court had reversed judgment, like Sotomayor and Jackson wanted to, Broadnax would have been allowed “to have a full trial and have an opportunity to prove that the prosecution blocked Black individuals from serving on the jury.”

“If in those proceeding the courts found that there was evidence of racial discrimination by the prosecutors, then Broadnax would be given a new trial that would allow the defense to argue he did not commit the crime, and that would be decided by an entirely new jury,” Badas said.

In the petition to the Supreme Court, Broadnax’s lawyers argued that new evidence has also emerged indicating race played a role in the jury selection process, but that Texas courts did not allow him to present that evidence. Among those was a spreadsheet that prosecutors created and which bolded the name of prospective Black jurors. The document was not disclosed until the case reached federal court.

“Review is necessary here because the newly disclosed evidence establishes that a DA’s office with a long and notorious history of racially discriminatory jury selection practices continued to flout this Court’s direction,” the petition read. “Left undisturbed, the State’s explicit discrimination will erode the Court’s authority and public confidence in our criminal justice system.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth upheld Broadnax’s conviction and death sentence in 2021. It ruled that he could not have presented the spreadsheet because it had not been part of evidence when the case was in state court.

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