The Supreme Court on Monday paved the way for Michael Sockwell, 63, to receive a new trial 36 years after a Montgomery judge sentenced him to death.
Mr. Sockwell was charged in the 1988 killing of a Montgomery sheriff’s deputy that prosecutors said was orchestrated by the deputy’s wife.
During jury selection, then-Assistant District Attorney Ellen Brooks struck 80% of the qualified Black prospective jurors, including one Black man whom she admitted she struck because he was the “same race, sex, and age” as the defendant.
Mr. Sockwell was convicted of capital murder. The jury voted 7-5 to impose a life-without-parole sentence, but the trial judge overrode the jury’s verdict and sentenced Mr. Sockwell to death. Until Alabama became the last state to eliminate judge override in 2017, Alabama judges routinely overrode jury verdicts of life and imposed the death penalty.
This past summer, after more than three decades on Alabama’s death row, Mr. Sockwell was granted a new trial by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The federal appeals court found that prosecutors had violated his right to a fair trial by illegally striking potential jurors based on their race.
Ellen Brooks had a “significant history of striking jurors in a racially discriminatory manner right before and during Sockwell’s trial in 1990,” the federal court observed. Both of Alabama’s appellate courts found several instances of Brooks striking Black jurors in violation of Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court decision that established a procedure for courts to intervene when racial bias infects jury selection. Before and after Batson, the court wrote, “Brooks purposefully struck Black jurors in the cases she prosecuted.”
And Brooks was “not the only culprit within the Montgomery County District Attorney’s office,” the court wrote, noting that Bruce Maddox also engaged in striking Black jurors in a racially discriminatory manner, even after the Alabama Supreme Court repeatedly chastised him for necessitating costly retrials by continuing to strike potential Black jurors for “whimsical, ad hoc excuses” that the court had previously rejected.
True to form, Ms. Brooks struck eight of the 10 Black jurors from Mr. Sockwell’s jury, and comparing the reasons she gave for striking Black jurors with her reasons for not striking white jurors, the court concluded there was a “substantial likelihood of race-based considerations in the exercise of those strikes.”
Based on the “overwhelming evidence in this record,” the federal appeals court found that the prosecutor’s racially discriminatory strikes violated Mr. Sockwell’s rights under the Equal Protection Clause and granted habeas relief. “Equal justice under law requires a criminal trial free of racial discrimination in the jury selection process,” the court concluded.
The State of Alabama asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the federal appeals court’s decision, but the Court declined to review the case.
In November, a federal judge directed prosecutors to make plans for a new trial by March 18 or release Mr. Sockwell from prison, the Associated Press reported. A Montgomery County District Attorney’s office spokesperson told AP that the office intends to retry the case but declined additional comment.