Black Juror Finds She Was on ‘All-White’ Panel

By the time Edward Motton’s case reached the state Supreme Court, everyone assumed that he had been convicted by an all-white jury. The justices unanimously overturned his murder conviction largely because of that.

However, Carolyn Pritchett knew differently. She was on the jury four years ago, and she is black. After learning Tuesday that Motton’s case had been reversed because there were no black women on the jury, she called her hometown paper, the Oakland Tribune, to point out the oversight.

“I was the only black person there, and it was easy to spot me,” she told the Tribune.

The Alameda County district attorney and the state attorney general immediately said they would ask the court to rewrite the opinion, while Motton’s lawyers said Pritchett’s presence on the panel makes no difference.

Both sides were trying to figure out how Pritchett was overlooked.

The written record of the trial does not identify the jurors by race, lawyers said. However, beyond that, there was a “breakdown in communication,” Alameda Dist. Atty. John Meehan said.

The lawyer who prosecuted Motton might have caught the mistake, but he had left the district attorney’s office by the time the case was appealed. The judge who selected the jury did not preside over the actual trial, and the trial judge has since died.

Motton’s trial lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Cole Powell, said he thought the judge took notes about the jury, but added that it was not his job to tell the judge to note Pritchett’s race.

Like the others involved in the trial, he was aware of Pritchett’s race but said the appellate lawyers “never bothered to check with the district attorney, the judge or me.”

The case began in June, 1979, when Motton stabbed to death Ernest Martinez near downtown Oakland. The two did not know each other. When police questioned Motton, he said his house had been “demonized” and Martinez had something to do with it.

The Supreme Court reversed the conviction, in part, because the judge who selected the jury dismissed as “totally fallacious” Powell’s claim that the prosecutor had excluded black women from the jury. Powell had raised his concern about the “systematic exclusion of blacks” before Pritchett was seated.

The court noted that to ensure fair trials, juries must reflect the community’s ethnic makeup. When defense lawyers raise the charge that prosecutors are excluding blacks from juries, judges must investigate.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Mark Howell, who argued the case before the high court, did not hold out much hope that the court would change its opinion. However, he said he will ask the court to reconsider its ruling soon, but not before he has had a chance “to review everything to make sure it is correct.”