WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday firmly rejected the use of racial stereotypes when deciding the proper sentence for a convicted criminal, reopening the case of a black man who was condemned to death after his Texas jury was told African-Americans are statistically more likely than whites to commit violent crimes.
“Our laws punish people for what they do, not for who they are,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said in the courtroom. Providing the jury with such crime statistics appealed “to a particularly noxious strain of racial prejudice,” he wrote in the decision. “Some toxins can be deadly in small doses.”
The 6-2 decision faulted Texas authorities and judges for refusing to give a new sentencing hearing to Duane Buck, a Houston man convicted of shooting and killing his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend in 1995.
As jurors were hearing testimony during the punishment phase, a court-appointed defense attorney called an expert witness to testify that Buck’s violent outburst was a psychological reaction to his breakup. But the expert also ended up citing controversial statistics suggesting that blacks are more likely than whites to commit more crimes.
The jury then decided Buck posed a “future danger” and sentenced him to death rather than life in prison.
Years later, Texas state attorneys reopened the cases of five other black defendants who were sentenced to death based partly on that same testimony about the statistics.
However they refused to reopen Buck’s case because it was his own court-appointed lawyer, not the prosecutor, who had called the expert to the witness stand.