In dissent, the three liberal justices said a Black inmate had not received a fair trial when he was convicted by jurors who had expressed opposition to interracial marriage.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear an appeal from a Black death row inmate in Texas who was convicted by an all-white jury that included jurors who had expressed opposition to interracial marriage.
As is its custom, the court gave no reasons for turning down the appeal. The court’s three liberal members dissented, saying that the jurors’ racial prejudice deprived the inmate, Andre Lee Thomas, of a fair trial.
Mr. Thomas was convicted of murdering his wife, who was white, their son and his wife’s daughter from an earlier relationship. Prosecutors agreed that he was psychotic at the time, though they said he had voluntarily induced the psychosis by drinking cough medicine.
Mr. Thomas tried to remove his victim’s hearts to, he said, “set them free from evil.” While awaiting trial, he removed one of his eyes. Years later, he removed the other one.
Prospective jurors were asked their views of interracial marriage and procreation on a multiple-choice form, and several of them said they disapproved.
One prospective juror indicated that he was vigorously opposed and that he was “not afraid to say so.” He added: “I don’t believe God intended for this.”
Two other prospective jurors indicated that they opposed people of different races marrying or having children but that they tried to keep their feelings to themselves. One said: “I think we should stay with our blood line.”
Mr. Thomas’s lawyers did not use peremptory challenges to strike the jurors, and they did not ask the judge to remove them for cause. All three jurors were seated.
During the penalty phase of the trial, a prosecutor asked the jury to consider the danger Mr. Thomas might pose if he were not executed. “Are you going to take the risk about him asking your daughter out or your granddaughter out?” the prosecutor asked the jury.
In an unusual and impassioned 14-page dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote that Mr. Thomas had not received the effective assistance of counsel guaranteed by the Constitution.
“Thomas’s offense involved not only interracial violence, but also interracial intimacy,” she wrote. “Historians have long recognized that interracial marriage, sex and procreation evoke some of the most invidious forms of prejudice and violence.”
Justice Sotomayor quoted from the work of the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal: “No other way of crossing the color line is so attended by the emotion commonly associated with violating a social taboo as intermarriage and extramarital relations between a Negro man and a white woman.”
Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in the case, Thomas v. Lumpkin, No. 21-444.
“By failing to challenge, or even question, jurors who were hostile to interracial marriage in a capital case involving that explosive topic, Thomas’s counsel performed well below an objective standard of reasonableness,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “This deficient performance prejudiced Thomas by depriving him of a fair trial.”
The courts had also failed, she wrote.
“It is ultimately the duty of the courts ‘to confront racial animus in the justice system,’” she wrote, quoting an earlier decision. “That responsibility requires courts, including this one, vigilantly to safeguard the fairness of criminal trials by ensuring that jurors do not harbor, or at the very least could put aside, racially biased sentiments.”
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