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Colorado Supreme Court lays out frustration with current method of ID’ing racial bias in jury selection
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Colorado’s justices escalated their frustration on Monday with the existing framework for evaluating race-motivated dismissals of jurors in criminal trials, months after the state Supreme Court also invited lawmakers to do their part to fix the problem. Under longstanding U.S. Supreme Court precedent, intentional race-based discrimination in jury selection is unconstitutional. Normally, parties may exercise…
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Justices critical of proposed racial bias rule supported by defense attorneys, trial judges
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Colorado’s Supreme Court justices gave a less-than-enthusiastic reception on Tuesday to a proposed rule that, if enacted, would aim to curb lawyers’ ability to remove people of color from criminal juries for reasons related to race. During a nearly three-hour hearing, prosecutors from across the state uniformly lined up to condemn the suggested change, with…
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Appeals court finds no racial discrimination in Black man’s dismissal from El Paso County jury
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Colorado’s second-highest court on Thursday found no intentional racial discrimination at play when El Paso County prosecutors removed the only Black man from a Black defendant’s jury, after misrepresenting what he actually said during jury selection. Michael Ellis is serving a prison sentence of more than 200 years after a jury convicted him in 2019…
