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Follow the leader

Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has shown conspicuous deference to lower courts and a reluctance to recognize racial discrimination.

The debate over the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. is casting light on two of the most troublesome defects in the American criminal justice system: a lingering vulnerability to racial prejudice and a rule-bound mentality that often cares more about procedure than justice.

Both were involved in a 2001 death penalty case in which a split decision of Alito's 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals granted a new trial to James William Riley, a black man sent to death row in Delaware for a liquor store robbery-murder. Riley's guilt was obvious but it appeared that the prosecutor, who was acquainted with the victim, had stacked the jury to ensure a death sentence.

The majority held that the prosecutor had used peremptory challenges, for which no grounds are required, to systematically exclude blacks from the jury, a practice that the Supreme Court ruled against in 1986. There was compelling evidence, including the prosecutor's admission that he had kept a white juror who had wanted to be excused but dismissed a black juror for the same reason. Moreover, black residents had been purged from the three other murder juries in the county that year. But Alito argued in dissent that it was all beside the point. The appeals court, he said, lacked the power to second-guess a Delaware judge who believed the prosecutor's claim that race had not been on his mind at all.

"This is a troubling case," Alito wrote, "... but I do not believe that there is a proper basis for disturbing the credibility findings made by a conscientious state judge." To belittle what he called the majority's "simplistic analysis," he implied that the all-white cast of four juries was as coincidental as the fact that left-handed people had won five of the previous six presidential elections.

Judge Dolores Korman Sloviter expanded her majority opinion to rebut Alito's dissent.

"It is not required," she wrote, "that a federal court should defer to a state court's findings of fact" when the prosecutor's race-neutral explanation was so "incredible, contradicted and implausible." She criticized Alito's digression on left-handedness as minimizing "the history of discrimination against prospective black jurors and black defendants."

Riley's new trial resulted in a life sentence, the same as a co-defendant who had been spared for testifying against him.

Alito's reluctance to recognize the bias in Riley's first trial was consistent with other cases his critics cite in which Alito was conspicuously deferential to administrative agencies and lower courts that had ruled against discrimination complaints.

It is true that appeals courts owe reasonable respect to the fact-finding function of lower courts, but the fundamental purpose of the law is not to play follow the leader. It is, rather, to serve justice. There would be no use to appellate courts if they were as powerless to correct serious errors as Alito on occasion has seemed to think they should be. It will be the duty of the Senate Judiciary Committee to make certain that he doesn't feel that way about the Supreme Court.

[Last modified November 29, 2005, 02:15:28]