Darryl Carter, et al. v. James E. Stewart, Sr., in his Official Capacity as District Attorney of Caddo Parish, Louisiana

Petitioners Carter, Johnson, and Hawthorne are Black citizens of Louisiana’s First Judicial District who joined an existing § 1983 suit against Respondent in his official capacity as District Attorney. Each Petitioner was excluded from jury service by peremptory challenges exercised by Respondent’s assistants. Petitioners alleged that these strikes followed Respondent’s policy, custom, or usage of racially-discriminatory peremptory challenges. Petitioners relied in part on a statistical analysis of jury selection records in 395 criminal trials conducted by Respondent’s prosecutors, showing that Black jurors had 4.97 times greater odds of being struck by prosecutors than non-Black jurors; where the defendant on trial was Black, the Black jurors’ odds of prosecutorial exclusion increased to 5.54 times greater than those of non-Black jurors. This evidence was corroborated by testimony of a former prosecutor and a defense attorney, as well as a public statement by Respondent, issued days before his first election as District Attorney, condemning the office’s raciallydiscriminatory jury practices. Moreover, in the trials where Petitioners were struck, the prosecutors used their peremptories exclusively on Black citizens. The district court, evincing skepticism regarding the viability of a civil action under § 1983 brought by peremptorily-challenged jurors alleging their exclusion was racially discriminatory, granted summary judgment, ignoring the factual disputes which would ordinarily preclude such a ruling. The Court of Appeals affirmed this dismissal, similarly disregarding settled summary judgment standards. (i)