Taylor Rene Parker v. Texas

This petition presents the following questions:

1. To protect the right to an impartial jury, the Sixth Amendment requires transferring venue when there is extensive and prejudicial pretrial publicity. Social media is now the dominant forum for pretrial publicity, but the court below—like courts across the country—refused to meaningfully analyze it. Was the lower court required to consider “smoking gun” confessions published on Facebook by local news groups and inflammatory Facebook commentary calling for Petitioner’s death without a fair trial?

2. This Court recently reaffirmed in Andrew v. White that the erroneous admission of prejudicial, irrelevant evidence about a capital defendant’s sex life, failings as a mother, and demeanor as a wife can render a trial fundamentally unfair. In the sentencing phase of Taylor Parker’s capital murder trial, the State spent weeks eliciting irrelevant, salacious testimony rooted in these same sex stereotypes. Does the Due Process clause require vacatur and remand for a new sentencing proceeding?