U.S. Supreme Court Decides Three Cases Involving Race

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a Georgia man sentenced to death is entitled to a new trial because prosecutors deliberately excluded all African Americans from the jury based on their race. The 7-to-1 ruling was one of three high court decisions issued Monday involving racial discrimination.

In announcing the jury selection decision, Chief Justice John Roberts used unusually harsh words to describe the prosecutors' conduct. He labelled their proffered non-racial justifications for excluding all the black prospective jurors "nonsense," and "not true."

The decision came in the case of Timothy Foster, a black man sentenced to death for murdering an elderly white woman. The trial was nearly 30 years ago and just a year after the Supreme Court had dealt for the first time with one of the key elements of the American jury system — the practice of allowing each side to eliminate a set number of prospective jurors without giving any reason.

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