The Supreme Court today reverses the death sentence but affirms the defendant’s convictions in People v. Armstrong for a 1998 robbery, rape, torture, and murder in Long Beach. The court is divided 4-3 about whether a Batson challenge — alleging racial discrimination in the prosecution’s jury selection — requires a full reversal.
The majority opinion is by Justice Carol Corrigan and is signed by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye and Justices Ming Chin and Leondra Kruger. The court reverses the penalty, agreeing with Armstrong’s contention that the superior court erred by excusing at least four “jury candidates on the ground they could not fairly and impartially consider whether death was the appropriate punishment.” However, the majority concludes there was no problem with the trial court allowing the prosecution to peremptorily strike four male African-American prospective jurors. It also finds prosecutorial misconduct and evidentiary errors by the trial court, but concludes they were harmless.
Citing the dismissal of the African-American male prospective jurors, Justice Goodwin Liu dissents, joined by Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and pro tem Justice Dennis Perluss. He notes it was a racially charged case, one in which a white woman was murdered by three African-American men after she allegedly taunted them with racial slurs. The dissent finds the prosecution’s peremptory striking of one prospective juror “[e]specially troubling” because there are “a number of proffered explanations for the strike . . . that are implausible, misleading, contradicted by the record, or difficult to credit in light of the prosecutor’s disparate treatment of similarly situated jurors.”
Justice Liu also says it gives him “pause to credit” another reason — the prosecutor expressed concern about the prospective juror’s claim to have been subject to questionable stops by the police — because it “is so widely applicable to African Americans and . . . may itself be the product of racial bias, whether conscious or unconscious.” This concern echoes an observation that Liu expressed in a different Batson case over five years ago, when he said, “it is a troubling reality, rooted in history and social context, that our black citizens are generally more skeptical about the fairness of our criminal justice system than other citizens.”
Batson issues have often split the court before, including last May when the court affirmed the death penalty for Armstrong’s half-brother, who participated with Armstrong in the Long Beach murder.