racial
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Appeals court upholds convictions following claims of racial bias in jury selection
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Colorado’s second-highest court upheld the convictions of two criminal defendants who alleged prosecutors improperly dismissed jurors of color from their trials, although one appellate judge believed a lower court had failed to properly evaluate the potential for discrimination. Each appeal in the cases of Eve Martinez out of Weld County and D’Shay Damu Evans out…
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Appeals court rules racist comments not proper evidence, overturns assault conviction
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A Pueblo County judge should not have allowed jurors to hear about the racist comments a defendant made toward his friend hours before allegedly assaulting his godson, the state’s Court of Appeals decided on Thursday. Anthony Joseph Ianne’s case had already proceeded through a three-judge panel of the appellate court, which upheld his conviction last…
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State Supreme Court to hear criminal appeals involving racial bias, jury instructions
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The Colorado Supreme Court agreed to review whether an Arapahoe County judge, who is now a justice on the state’s highest court, correctly handled a potentially race-based dismissal of a Black juror, and whether jurors in an Adams County criminal trial should have received the definition of a key legal term – even though there is…
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Appeals court finds Arapahoe prosecutor misstated facts to eject Black juror, overturns convictions
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When asked to explain why he wanted to excuse a Black woman from the jury, an Arapahoe County prosecutor got offended, claimed he was being called racist, and offered inconsistent and factually untrue explanations for his actions. But while the prosecutor succeeded in convincing the trial judge to dismiss the juror, the state’s second-highest court…
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Appeals court offers competing interpretations of juror’s admission he ‘didn’t want diversity’
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A fractured Court of Appeals has upheld the kidnapping and sexual assault convictions of a man in Gilpin County, with sharp disagreement among the judges about the role racial bias played in his jury selection. Reginald Keith Clark, who is Black, is serving a 30-year sentence for bringing a white woman against her will from…
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Appeals court finds no racial discrimination despite excusal of three Black jurors in a row
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The state’s second-highest court has decided there was no intentional racial discrimination when an Arapahoe County prosecutor dismissed three Black people in a row from serving on a Black defendant’s jury. The appeal from Shawne Alexander Toney implicated the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark case of Batson v. Kentucky, which held that intentional racial discrimination in jury…
