Robert Keith Ray v. Colorado

Whether the State of Colorado violated petitioner’s rights to due process, a fair trial, and equal protection by failing to address prosecutorial misconduct in the form of pernicious use of racially charged language, including twenty-four instances of the all-white prosecution team using the N-word in front of the jury that convicted petitioner of murder, sometimes when referring to petitioner himself, a Black man.

Whether, given the persistent and pernicious presence of racial bias in the criminal legal system and the important position that prosectors hold in our society, constitutional harmless-error review should apply to prosecutorial misconduct of a racial nature even when such error is unpreserved due to a lack of contemporaneous objections by defense counsel.