Christopher Floyd was sentenced to death for the robbery and murder of Waylon Crawford
According to court documents Christopher Floyd would rob a grocery store and in the process would shoot and kill Waylon Crawford
Christopher Floyd would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
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Christopher Floyd is incarcerated at Holman Prison
Christopher Floyd Case
The U.S. Supreme Court Monday ordered Alabama courts to reconsider the conviction of a Houston County man on capital murder charges, based on evidence the prosecutor excluded blacks from the jury pool.
Prosecutors and the Alabama attorney general’s office argue there were race-neutral reasons for doing so.
Christopher Anthony Floyd, convicted and sentenced to death in 2006 for the 1992 murder of grocery store owner Waylon Crawford during a robbery, will have his case re-examined following a May Supreme Court ruling that allowed courts to consider challenges to jury composition based on evidence that emerges after a trial.
Floyd’s attorneys cited testimony during a remand hearing where the prosecutor acknowledged marking prospective black jurors with the letter “B” in what he described as “an initial gut-reaction system” that he used for decades and found to be “pretty accurate.”
The attorneys said at subsequent hearings, the prosecutors could not give an explanation as to why they struck Inez Culver, an African-American woman, from the jury despite her answering every question asked of prospective jurors. Floyd’s attorneys also argued prosecutors’ reasons for excluding three other potential black jurors was inconsistent with or contradicted by evidence given by those jurors.
“We’ve long complained about the problem of racial bias in jury selection,” Bryan Stephenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), which represented Floyd, said in an interview Monday morning. “There’s still a lot of prosecutors in a lot of counties who go into trials trying to exclude as many black people from juries as possible.
The Alabama attorney general’s office had no comment on the ruling Monday. A message seeking comment was left with the office of Houston County District Attorney Doug Valeska Monday morning.
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In a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on March 1, the attorney general’s office noted Floyd’s defense attorney testifying in a hearing that he wanted a jury “like (Floyd),” who is white. The attorney went on to say he sought a “young white male (that) goes hunting a lot, lives in the country, moderately educated, probably the lower end of (the) social and economic scale.”
The state went on to argue that Culver had provided answers to prosecutors’ questions and that the marking of jurors’ names did not in itself violate equal protections, arguing the case cited as precedent involved a prosecutor’s office with a history of discrimination. The state also argued the prosecutors provided effective race-neutral reasons for excluding all three jurors.
The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals in 2007 ordered a hearing in the case based on evidence of exclusion of black jurors. The trial court ruled that there were race-neutral reasons for excluding all but two jurors, including Culver. But the court ruled their exclusion was race-neutral because the prosecutors’ not remembering was not the same as deliberate discrimination.
The Alabama Supreme Court reversed that decision in 2012, saying the trial court had to provide findings on the reasons it struck black and/or female jurors. The trial court upheld its initial ruling, which state appellate courts also upheld. Floyd’s attorneys appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court last November.
The decision was one of three cases reversed following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last month in Foster v. Chatman. In that case, the nation’s high court ruled that Timothy Foster, a Georgia man convicted of a 1986 murder had shown prosecutors worked to exclude black jurors from the jury that convicted him.
Despite the new evidence, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected Foster’s petition. The U.S. Supreme Court last month reversed the state court’s decision.
As is customary, the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority did not issue an opinion explaining their decision in Floyd’s case. In a dissent filed with Flowers v. Mississippi – one of the three cases remanded Monday – Justice Samuel Alito argued the Foster decision stemmed from “case-specific” evidence and that trial judges were “entitled to a very healthy measure of deference” in determining the role of juries.
“If we granted review in these cases, we would delve into the facts and carefully review the trial judge’s findings on the question of the prosecution’s intent,” Alito wrote in the dissent, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. “That is what we did in Foster. But we do not often engage in review of such case-specific factual questions, and we do not want to do that here. Therefore, we will grant, vacate, and remand so that the lower court can do – or redo – that hard work.”
Stevenson said racial bias in jury selection “undermines the integrity of the criminal justice system.”
“What we’ve found is regardless of the race of the defendant, a lot of prosecutors appear not to trust black people in juries, which is illegal and unconstitutional,” he said. “Obviously, it’s a problem for black defendants, but it’s also a problem for white defendants.”
EJI brought a federal lawsuit against Valeska in 2011, arguing Houston and Henry County prosecutors illegally excluded blacks from juries in capital cases. U.S. District Judge Harold Albritton dismissed the case in 2012, writing the plaintiffs had failed to state an appropriate basis for relief.”
