US Supreme Court Keeps Texas Man on Death Row, 2 Justices Object

The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on June 21, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of Texas death row inmate James Broadnax, who had sought a new trial.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the high court’s decision not to hear Mr. Broadnax’s appeal. They said they would “reserve the judgment,” meaning they would have postponed the judgment that had been issued by a lower court.

The Supreme Court did not say why his appeal was denied.

Attorneys for Mr. Broadnax, who is black, alleged that the Dallas County district attorney’s office acted in a racially discriminatory manner. His attorneys argued that his jury trial in 2009 violated his constitutional right to a jury that doesn’t have a racial bias, claiming that the jury was mostly white in its racial makeup.

Further, his lawyers alleged that Dallas prosecutors struck black jurors from his trial.

“Review is necessary here because the newly disclosed evidence establishes that a DA’s office with a long and notorious history of racially discriminatory jury selection practices continued to flout this Court’s direction,” Mr. Broadnax’s lawyers wrote in a petition to the high court.

“Left undisturbed, the State’s explicit discrimination will erode the Court’s authority and public confidence in our criminal justice system.”

According to Mr. Broadnax’s attorneys, prosecutors did not disclose their jury-selection spreadsheet until his case reached the federal court system and wanted an evidentiary hearing on his claims about alleged discrimination.

They said that the spreadsheet provided evidence that the district attorney’s office used their strikes to remove black jurors from the pool, which they added would be unconstitutional.

Attorneys for the state of Texas, who argued against Mr. Broadnax’s claims, asked the Supreme Court to deny his petition and said there was “no evidence of discriminatory office policies at the time of Broadnax’s trial.”

Responding to the document disclosure, the state said, “Nothing about this practice evidences race discrimination. The race of each juror was obviously known prior to individual voir dire (jury selection process): each person’s race was indicated on the first page of their questionnaire.

“The judges and both parties used copies of the questionnaires. The parties read hundreds of questionnaires and conducted individual voir dire on 130 prospective jurors over approximately two months,” their motion said.

Conviction and Sentencing

Mr. Broadnax was convicted of capital murder in 2009 for the fatal shooting of Stephen Swan and Matthew Butler, two Christian music producers, during a robbery.

He was sentenced to death by a jury in Dallas when he was 20. Mr. Broadnax filed a petition to the Supreme Court in October, saying that the trial violated his constitutional right to a jury without racial bias.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 2021 upheld his death sentence, noting that Mr. Broadnax had given interviews with local media outlets that “became the foundation of the State’s case at trial.”

In the interviews, Mr. Broadnax had “confessed to the murder and robbery and provided explicit details of the murder.”

The court added, “He admitted that he alone killed Swan and Butler, that he had no remorse, and he hoped for the death penalty.”

The appeals court noted that during his trial, Mr. Broadnax “did not dispute that he killed the victims, but he developed an extensive mitigation case that focused on his drug use at the time of the offenses.”

He also “presented expert testimony to the effect that because he committed the crimes at the age of nineteen, his brain would not have been fully developed,” the court added.