by Lauren Sudeall Lucas, Associate Professor, Georgia State University College of Law
In imposing the most severe of sentences—the death penalty—our legal system expects and requires jurors to be fair and impartial.That requires them to refrain from making decisions based on race. What then would we make of a capital juror who questions whether black people “have souls” and suggested that a black defendant wasn’t “in the ‘good’ black folks category” but instead told an attorney in a sworn affidavit that the defendant was a “ni**er”? Allowing that juror to decide whether a black defendant should be sentenced to death would directly contradict the principles on which our legal system is based, and yet that is precisely what happened in the case of Keith Tharpe, who is scheduled for execution in Georgia on September 26.
