ACLU and ACLU of Mississippi Urge Court to Consider Racial Discrimination in Willie Manning Case

JACKSON, Ms. – The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Mississippi, and
partners filed an amicus brief today urging the Mississippi Supreme Court to consider
Willie Manning’s claim that prosecutors unconstitutionally excluded Black prospective
jurors from his 1994 capital trial. The brief warns that racial discrimination in jury
selection was one of several alarming problems that undermine the reliability of
Manning’s conviction and death sentence.

At trial, prosecutors systematically excluded Black jurors from Manning’s jury, resulting
in a nearly all white jury in a county where Black people made up 34% of the population.
Prosecutors struck six of the nine Black prospective jurors, for reasons including that
the prospective juror read “Ebony” or “Jet” magazines or lived in an “extremely bad
neighborhood” -- in other words, a predominantly Black neighborhood. Manning’s
lawyers challenged the strikes under Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court case that
prohibits prosecutors from striking jurors based on race, but the trial judge accepted the
prosecutor’s purportedly race-neutral explanations without conducting the proper legal
analysis to determine whether they were simply pretexts for discrimination.

“Juries are supposed to reflect the communities that they represent, and that’s for good
reason: diverse juries deliberate more thoroughly, consider a wider range of evidence,
and make fewer mistakes,” said Anna Arceneaux, deputy director of the ACLU’s
Capital Punishment Project. “When racial discrimination shapes who gets to serve
on a jury, it undermines the fairness of the entire process for the accused and for
prospective jurors alike. In Mr. Manning’s case, the evidence suggests that racial
discrimination played a major role in shaping the jury that decided whether he would
live or die, and when a person’s life is on the line, the court cannot afford to look past
that.”

The racial discrimination in jury selection is particularly concerning in this case
considering the broader questions surrounding Manning’s conviction and death
sentence and known Batson violations in similar cases in Mississippi. Examples of
prosecutorial misconduct, the known leading cause of wrongful convictions, run rampant throughout Manning’s case. The same district attorney who prosecuted Manning was responsible for sending several innocent people to prison who were later exonerated. At least twice in the last 7 years, the Supreme Court has sharply condemned Mississippi prosecutors' Batson violations in two cases with striking similarities to Manning’s (Flowers and Pitchford).

“To date, the justice system has failed Mr. Manning,” said Ayanna Hill, racial justice
attorney, at the ACLU of Mississippi. “We are hopeful that can change, and the
Court finds that a lower court’s lack of meaningful review of a prosecutor’s jury strikes
undermines the validity of a conviction and death sentence.”

The ACLU and ACLU of Mississippi are asking the Mississippi Supreme Court to grant
Manning permission to file a post-conviction relief petition to address the prosecution’s
systematic and unconstitutional discrimination against Black prospective jurors.