Exclusion of Black From Jury Leads to Reversal : Court: A drug conviction is overturned after a prosecutor said he dismissed the potential juror because she lived in Compton and probably would be suspicious of police motives.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday overturned the drug-sale conviction of a Los Angeles man, ruling that his constitutional rights were violated when a black woman was excluded from his jury.

The woman was excluded after a prosecutor asserted that since the woman lived in a low-income black neighborhood, she probably would be suspicious of police motives.

“Government acts based on such prejudice and stereotypical thinking are precisely the type of acts prohibited by the equal protection clause of the Constitution,” said the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, reversing the conviction against Leo Bishop stemming from a 1989 incident in Inglewood.

During jury selection, a federal prosecutor used five of his seven peremptory challenges. Three were used to strike white jurors. The remaining two were directed at black jurors.

Assistant U.S. Atty. John S. Gordon used the last challenge against Pearlie Burr, a black welfare-eligibility worker living in Compton.

Generally, an attorney does not have to state why he is using a peremptory challenge, unlike a challenge for cause, in which a reason has to be given.

However, a 1986 Supreme Court decision, Batson vs. Kentucky, held that peremptory challenges could not be used to exclude jurors on the basis of race. Bishop’s lawyer, Carlton F. Gunn, a deputy federal public defender, objected to Burr’s exclusion, contending that she was excluded on the basis of race.

Gordon said he felt that an eligibility worker in Compton “is likely to take the side of those who are having a tough time, aren’t upper-middle class and probably believe that police in Compton, in South-Central L.A., pick on black people.”

He added: “To some extent the rules of the game down there are probably different than they are in upper-middle-class communities. And they probably see police activity, which is, on the whole, more intrusive than you see in communities that are not so poor and violent.”

In support of his contention that he had not stricken Burr on the basis of race, Gordon stressed that two blacks remained on the jury, including a welfare-eligibility worker from Van Nuys. He also said that he would have challenged a white eligibility worker from Compton.

Gunn said Gordon’s reasons were not “race neutral,” the standard enunciated in the Batson decision. Since about three-quarters of Compton’s population is black, Gunn countered, residence becomes a surrogate for race.

The trial judge, James M. Ideman, said that even if the grounds for striking Burr were questionable, the case should proceed since the defendants had not been deprived of a representative jury.

But the appeals court ruled unanimously that excluding Burr from the jury violated Bishop’s rights. “To strike black jurors who reside in such communities on the assumption that they will sympathize with a black defendant rather than the police is akin to striking jurors who speak Spanish merely because the cases involve Spanish-speaking witnesses,” wrote Judge Dorothy W. Nelson. Judges Stephen Reinhardt and James R. Browning joined in the decision.

The appeals court ordered Bishop acquitted on six counts of assault and ordered that he be retried on three drug-distribution charges. Gordon said he could not comment on the ruling until he had thoroughly reviewed the decision.

Bishop and another man had been charged with conspiracy, assault, attempted murder of law enforcement officers and attempted distribution of cocaine stemming from an undercover sting operation.

After the sting became apparent, Bishop’s co-defendant, Dwight Weisner, drove a car around the parking lot of a market at LaBrea and Centinela avenues, trying to run the undercover officers down. Bishop, who was a passenger in the car, was acquitted of attempted murder but convicted of other charges and sentenced to 63 months in federal prison. Weisner was convicted of numerous charges and received a longer term. A third defendant, Gregory Briggs, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute cocaine.