NEW ORLEANS — Jim Williams had a reputation as a highly skilled, tenacious prosecutor -- maybe even a little bloodthirsty.
After scoring convictions in dozens of murder cases, he told a reporter: "It got to the point where there was no thrill for me unless there was a chance for the death penalty."
In the mid-'90s, Williams posed for Esquire magazine standing behind a miniature electric chair with mug shots of five African American men he sent to death row. Since then, two of the defendants have been exonerated, two had their sentences commuted to life because of misconduct by Williams, and the fifth won a retrial after an appeals court overturned the verdict.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is to review another case in which Williams obtained a death sentence against a black man. The key question is whether Williams violated Allen Snyder's constitutional rights by removing all the potential black jurors at the start of his 1996 trial.
The Supreme Court's decision is expected to affect not only whether death-row inmate Snyder lives or dies but also how courts around the country weigh claims of unlawful racial discrimination during jury selection.
At the end of the trial, Williams exhorted the all-white jury to give Snyder a death sentence because the case was "very, very similar" to the "most famous murder case" just a year earlier, in which former football star O.J. Simpson "got away with it."
Williams declined to be interviewed for this story.
As long ago as 1879, the Supreme Court said it was impermissible to arbitrarily exclude jurors because of their race. But putting teeth into such rulings has proved difficult.
In 2005, the Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction of a black man in Contra Costa County who was tried by an all-white jury, concluding that the California Supreme Court set too high a standard for when a trial judge should question a prosecutor's explanation for removing jurors.
In U.S. courts, attorneys are allowed to remove potential jurors in two ways. The first is called a challenge for cause, where the lawyer has to offer a specific reason for removal, such as when a juror is married to a police officer in a case involving an officer.
The second is called a peremptory strike, where lawyers are permitted to remove a juror based simply on a hunch or intuition. States generally limit the number of peremptory strikes -- in a capital-murder trial in Louisiana, the limit is 12.
