HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) — Some say time brings healing, but for Michael Sockwell, time brings a second look at his case after being on death row for more than three decades.
“It has to be a fair shake, and that’s what happened in this case, that it wasn’t,” Madison County Chief Deputy District Attorney Tim Gann said.
A jury convicted Sockwell of murdering Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Isaiah Harris in 1988. Sockwell later appealed the decision.
Two of three judges on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Sockwell’s favor, deciding his 14th Amendment rights were violated during the jury selection process before his 1990 trial.
Judge Charles Wilson wrote the opinion and said that Alabama prosecutors “repeatedly and purposefully” rejected qualified Black jurors at the time. Wilson specifically recalled the notes Montgomery County Assistant District Attorney Ellen Brooks took regarding striking a potential juror, Eric Davis, a black male.
“Brooks said that she struck Davis because he could not remember specifics about the pre-trial publicity, yet there were white jurors who could not remember what they heard about the case, and Brooks did not strike them.
Sockwell points out that Brooks directly compared Davis to Sockwell, by stating that ‘Davis, according to my notes, is a [B]lack male, approximately twenty-three years of age, which would put him very close to the same race, sex, and age of the defendant.’ This comparison is relevant because it supports that Brooks felt as if Davis ‘would be partial to [Sockwell] because of their shared race.’
Brooks struck 80% of the qualified Black jurors while striking only 22% of the qualified white jurors.”
Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Charles Wilson
Wilson continued in the opinion, citing four other cases where state prosecutors seemingly demonstrated a “pattern” of “discriminatory intent” in regard to jury selection.
The federal appeals court’s decision calls for a retrial 35 years after the case was initially tried.
“To have fair juries, you cannot strike a juror based on race,” Gann said. “There has to be a race-neutral reason to strike any juror. And the court found this juror was struck solely based upon his race.”
The jury recommended that Sockwell serve a life sentence. The judge overrode that decision and sentenced him to death.
Gann said jury selection is crucial in every trial, but especially when it comes to capital murder cases.
“It is the most important thing to the outcome of a trial, I believe,” Gann said. “Jury selection in capital murder cases takes so long because you have to spend a lot of time with each individual juror so that you can know exactly how they feel on certain issues before you start the process.”
Some may ask, ‘How is a retrial fair after such a public trial where people may have their own conclusions about the case?’ Gann said fairness is also determined in the selection process.
“If you have somebody that has been following this case for years and years or maybe was there and kept up with it when it was actually being tried for the first time, those people are disqualified automatically,” Gann said.
Judges can no longer override the sentencing decision of the jury, per Alabama law signed in 2017. Nonetheless, Gann said retrials must abide by the laws at the time of the crime.
“If the jury does the same thing and recommends life without parole, whoever the siting judge is can give them the death penalty and it will be lawful,” Gann said.
Gann expects it will take quite some time before a retrial date is set.
More details about the case are available on our website.
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