Supreme Court set for case on racial bias in jury selection
Supreme Court News
Curtis Flowers has been jailed in Mississippi for 22 years, even as prosecutors couldn't get a murder conviction against him to stick through five trials.
Three convictions were tossed out, and two other juries couldn't reach unanimous verdicts.
This week, the Supreme Court will consider whether his conviction and death sentence in a sixth trial should stand or be overturned for a familiar reason: because prosecutors improperly kept African-Americans off the jury.
The justices on Wednesday will examine whether District Attorney Doug Evans' history of excluding black jurors should figure in determining if Evans again crossed a line when he struck five African-Americans from the jury that most recently convicted Flowers of killing four people.
In overturning Flowers' third conviction, the Mississippi Supreme Court called Evans' exclusion of 15 black prospective jurors "as strong a prima facie case of racial discrimination as we have seen" in challenges to jury composition. This time around, though, the state's high court has twice rejected Flowers' claims, even after being ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to take another look.
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Texas Adopts Statewide Texting-While-Driving Ban
Effective September 1, 2017, Texas will become the 47th state to pass a statewide ban on texting while driving. Governor Abbott’s signing of House Bill 62 is an effort to unify Texas under a uniform ban and remedy the “patchwork quilt of regulations that dictate driving practices in Texas.”
The bill specifically prohibits drivers from reading, writing, or sending an electronic message on a device unless the vehicle is stopped. That includes texting and emailing. It does not, however, prohibit dialing a number to call someone, talking on the phone using a hands-free device, or using the phone’s GPS system.
Violations would be punishable by a fine ranging from $25 to $99, to be set by each municipality. Although penalties could rise to as much as $200 for repeat offenders.
Studies have found that a driver’s reaction time is half as much when a driver is distracted by sending or reading a text message. According to state officials, in 2015 more than 105,000 traffic accidents in Texas involved distracted driving, leading to at least 476 fatalities.