Why did the paper of record downplay a judicial finding of a clearly racist jury selection process in Orleans, while including the “perspective” of discredited former District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro?
A hopeful act of justice took place recently when a New Orleans district court granted a new trial to Jabari Williams, who had been serving a life-without-parole sentence. The judge reversed and dismissed Williams’ conviction and sentence because, during his 2012 trial, Orleans prosecutors sought to exclude potential Black jurors, violating Williams’ constitutional rights. In contrast, this week, current Orleans prosecutors came to court to concede the office’s culpability and, accordingly, advocate for a new trial. It’s an important story, with implications that go far beyond this one case. However, readers of the Times Picayune/Nola.com/The Advocate won’t get to read that story, because the leading hometown outlet’s story failed to report and contextualize the legal issues clearly. Among other shortcomings, the piece included commentary from the former New Orleans District Attorney without noting his office’s history of misconduct or his personal stake in commenting on the Williams case. Compounding the impact of problematic local coverage, the Associated Press pulled its (unbylined) story almost entirely from Nola.com’s. The AP’s shoddy, derivative take ran in various Louisiana local newspapers, the U.S. News and World Report, and elsewhere.
The story of Jabari Williams, and how his conviction and sentence were vacated, is important for many reasons. In the life-without-parole world capital, he’s serving life without parole. According to his attorneys, he is a man with intellectual disability, who has long asserted his innocence, in a system that produces a disproportionate number of wrongful convictions against people with his disability. Most importantly, as a Black man in Louisiana, he has contended with a particularly problematic justice system that feeds into the nation’s largest prison population. Racial disparities at every step of Louisiana’s criminal justice process result in a prison population that holds four Black men for every one white man.
While Louisiana’s racist criminal justice system is the essential context for understanding the Williams case, it’s also true that the Williams case illuminates multiple aspects of racial bias by different state actors, at different stages. After Orleans prosecutors violated the law in seeking to strike potential jurors based on their race, then, on appeal, Louisiana courts refused to acknowledge or enforce the appropriate race-neutral standards for jury selection. Orleans prosecutors spent reams of taxpayer dollars to defend their jury selection in Williams’ case for years, and Louisiana’s courts sided with them. The state appellate system, that “failsafe” of checks and balances, failed in Williams, as it so often does, and the U.S. Supreme Court had to intervene.
According to a 2012 Louisiana Law Review article, the unconstitutional removal of Black people from jury pools by prosecutors is one of the primary drivers of Black overrepresentation in Louisiana prisons. The recent decision by current Orleans prosecutors to change course in Williams’ case, admit wrongdoing, and advocate for his right to a better trial than he got is inspiring, rare and newsworthy. Nola.com’s failure to report it as such serves as a reminder that it’s worth thinking about the ways in which local media impacts and drives public acceptance or rejection of the criminal justice system, especially changes to that system.
Too often, local media covers new developments in criminal justice – crimes, charges, trials, sentences – as isolated, unique stories. In an attempt to achieve journalistic neutrality, legal coverage is written, generally, from a “both sides” perspective. This is a fine approach, when it comes to the immediate, specific, new facts at hand. However, media coverage of criminal justice has to root its stories in a larger context using the objective and available factual data about criminal justice practices and outcomes. In New Orleans, acknowledging that context, and the specific history that produced it, can require the journalist and their outlet to validate one “side” of a criminal justice story over the other. They may not want to do it, but the fact is that when media coverage of new developments in Louisiana’s criminal justice system omits the larger framework of racial bias, it’s more than a missed opportunity. Stories like that actively participate in spreading the lie that the state of Louisiana (very much including the Orleans DA’s office) has told for decades: that it has been racially neutral in its administration of criminal justice. That’s simply not true.
In Jabari Williams’ 2012 second-degree murder trial, prosecuted by then-District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s office, the jury selection process reeked of racial discrimination, which is constitutionally prohibited by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Batson v. Kentucky (1986), among other precedents. During Williams’ trial, the state sought to keep Black people off his jury in the following ways: prosecutors used all 12 of their peremptory strikes against potential jurors who were Black; they moved to strike two Black prospective jurors who were not asked any questions. Later, on appeal, Orleans Parish prosecutors defended the jury selection while changing the stated reasons that the state originally used when seeking to strike potential Black jurors; and, prosecutors sought to remove Black jurors from the pool for their answers to questions which were similarly answered by non-Black people, who the state did not seek to strike.
In other words, prosecutors wanted Williams’ jury to be as white as possible. They often do. However, that wasn’t the only thing wrong in Williams’ interactions with police and prosecutors.
In the early morning hours of an April day in 2011, Selvin Gonzalez was tragically shot and killed in New Orleans. A 911 caller asserted, and surveillance video corroborates, that he lost his life in a drive-by shooting. Video footage from a nearby gas station, taken shortly before the shooting, shows Gonzalez interacting with Williams. The two men leave, on foot, headed in opposite directions. Minutes later, Gonzalez was shot; minutes after that, Williams is shown again on the gas station’s video, with no blood or weapon. Ten days after Gonzalez lost his life, New Orleans police broadcast the gas station footage, asking witnesses to come forward. Williams went to a police station to share what he knew.
Like others with intellectual disability, Williams was particularly susceptible to being lured into a false confession, and that appears to be what happened in the ensuing conversation with New Orleans police. Defense submitted testing showing that Williams has a full-scale IQ of 63. No person is a number or a diagnosis, but that information does speak to a person’s ability to advocate for himself, particularly under duress. During a 90-minute interrogation using the Reid technique, a method that has been criticized for producing false confessions in juveniles and persons with intellectual disability, Williams asserted his guilt one time, before immediately attempting to retract the statement. It’s well-established that persons with intellectual disability are at heightened risk of wrongful conviction, “particularly due to the risk of false confessions.” Based on his statement of guilt, Williams was arrested, charged with, and convicted of second-degree murder, which carries a mandatory life sentence in Louisiana.
After losing an appeal, and the Louisiana Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case, the U.S. Supreme Court finally stepped in on the jury selection issue. Writing for the majority, former Justice Ginsburg sided with Williams in her brief remand order, vacating the Fourth Circuit, and requiring that Louisiana courts take another look at the prosecution’s actions during the seating of Williams’ jury. Specifically, the court found fault with Louisiana’s variant Batson process, in which the judge can provide reasons for the prosecutors’ peremptory challenges, a practice that “does not conform with Batson and its progeny.” Ginsburg also makes the sadly-necessary point that, “A Louisiana court, ‘like any other state or federal court, is bound by this Court’s interpretation of federal law.’”
The U.S. Supreme Court has rebuked the Orleans DA’s office many times, because the prosecutorial misconduct they commit has been glaring, profoundly harmful, and secures unreliable outcomes that are often reversed on appeal. The criminal justice reporters of New Orleans have a public duty to understand and communicate that context every time they cover charges of, and judicial findings of, prosecutorial misconduct from Orleans. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, there have been 27 innocent men successfully prosecuted by the Orleans DA who were later exonerated of all charges; 25 of the 27 are Black. More than half of those cases involved judicial findings that prosecutorial misconduct occurred, including four death penalty cases.
It should be easy to write related news stories in all their fullness. There is plenty of relevant, available data, both about the harm caused by racist jury selection, and documentation of the prevalence of this practice in Louisiana. As LDF put it, “The right to serve on, and be tried by, an impartial jury constituted in a nondiscriminatory manner is as integral to full participation in our democracy as our right to vote. For precisely that reason, those who seek to deny full citizenship to African Americans have always sought to deny this right.” Rampant in Louisiana, both a 2003 study of Jefferson Parish, and a 2015 study of Caddo Parish found prosecutors striking prospective jurors who were Black at a rate of 3X that of other potential jurors. When the current Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office submitted its recent stipulation in Williams’ case, it cited a defense study showing that in the six-month period of Williams’ 2012 sentencing, the state struck 78% of eligible African American jurors and only 17% of potential white jurors. The judge agreed to the stipulation, and vacated Williams’ conviction and sentence. This is a big deal. As Bryan Stevenson wrote in a 2010 Equal Justice Initiative report about racial discrimination in jury selection, “Historically, Louisiana has not been particularly receptive to jury discrimination claims.”
So, how should a journalist cover this moment? Particularly when, due to extreme media consolidation, the writer for the Times Picayune/Nola.com/The Advocate represents a virtual monopoly on local coverage?
Well, hopefully, better than Matt Sledge did. Nowhere in his June 19th piece, “New Orleans Judge Tosses Murder Conviction After Prosecutors Concede Racial Bias at Trial,” does Sledge explain the substance of what is at issue in Williams’ case. He doesn’t get into what racially-discriminatory jury strikes are, why prosecutors use that technique, why they matter in driving racial disparity in the larger criminal justice system, the multiple parishes where studies have shown their prevalence in Louisiana, among other missing elements.
Instead of any of this context, in the very first sentence, he frames the jury selection in Williams’ case by stating that both sides agree “there is a 1-in-1000 chance that the prosecutors accidentally struck 12 Black people from their client’s jury pool.” That summary is the extent of explanation of or discussion about racially biased jury selection in Williams’ or any other case; that it was not an accident.
The article then includes dueling statements, asserting that current DA Jason Williams’ statement on Jabari Williams “attacks” former DA Leon Cannizzaro, whose statement “blasted” DA Williams. Sensationalizing a feud between individuals rather than focusing on systemic issues is a poor start, but, worse, it’s very problematic to offer these two DAs’ “takes” in this kind of “both sides” journalism. Cannizzaro is a weighty public figure, and journalists certainly have a right to quote him. But it’s misleading to allow him to weigh in without acknowledging Cannizzaro’s personal stake in the Williams case and his decision to fight the appeal process, based on the racially-biased jury selection, for years. It also seems important, if Cannizzaro is to be quoted, to mention that this case is one of many serious sentences in cases handled by his office, that have been reversed, often due to prosecutorial error or misconduct, such as his judicially-condemned use of “fake subpoenas.”
The article provides no context on the newly-created Civil Rights Division within the Orleans DA’s office, but summarizes its efforts I Williams as working to have a “disputed conviction thrown out.” This is misleading. Any conviction can be called “disputed” by anyone. In Jabari Williams’ case, the U.S. Supreme Court found a Louisiana law unconstitutional. It ordered that the courts reconsider the facts, validating the defense’s, and now the state’s, current position: that the underlying legal process was not sound and fair.
Language matters. While the local paper of record is writing that the DA’s civil rights division runs around getting “disputed” “murder convictions” “tossed,” the New York Times chose to characterize it this way: Williams “announced a civil rights division, which would look at wrongful convictions, convictions obtained with nonunanimous juries, habitual-offender sentences and other excessive punishments. It would be the heart of Williams’s effort to right past wrongs.” In the state stipulation, the office explains its mission:
“Recognizing the need to redress instances of racial discrimination in the criminal legal system, the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office (OPDA) recently created a Civil Rights Division. The Division seeks to respond to and correct past harms and injustices the office has caused. When prospective jurors are excluded on the basis of their race, the entire system is harmed.”
In other words, the state’s filing, which led to the reversal, is about a state office taking responsibility for perpetuating racially-disparate outcomes and attempting to offer a correction. That is newsworthy and it’s a story Orleans parish readers should get to read. Obviously, the new division and its actions should be subject to scrutiny, criticism, and opposition – that’s democracy. But working democracy is tough to achieve in an extremely low-information environment.
It’s infuriating to see that the piece does include an irrelevant and racial stereotype-baiting section about the state’s allegation that Williams was a drug dealer seeking to sell to the victim – even though they didn’t charge him with that crime and the unsubstantiated allegation has nothing to do with the new developments in case.
Another unnecessary inclusion: a factually unreliable, but highly cinematic, version of the moment of Gonzalez’s death. Sledge writes, “Williams emerged from the dark and shot Gonzales four times as he pleaded for his life.” The only problem with giving readers this ultra-vivid visual image of Williams as cold-blooded shooter is that they may, or may not, remember the source of this “information” when Sledge states, two paragraphs later, that it comes from a less-than-credible witness who admitted “that he had trouble telling Black people apart.”
And consider the meaning of the word “but” in this final sentence of this section:
“On appeal, defense attorneys zeroed in on the jury selection process. Both the judge overseeing the case, Keva Landrum, and the lead prosecutor, Robert Moore, are Black. But Williams’ lawyers said the selection process was biased.
In characterizing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Williams’ case, the piece returns to comfortable terrain: the competing personalities of high-profile elected officials who are related to the case, Williams, Cannizzaro and the judge in Williams’ trial, Keva Landrum, who ran against Jason Williams for DA. Prioritizing this theme of a clash between individuals over systemic or legal analysis, the Nola.com piece brushes off any need to explain the Supreme Court’s rejection of Louisiana law in Williams’ case. Instead, Sledge seemingly defends the discredited state law by implying it was a streamlined approach to a byzantine federal procedure:
“In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court kicked the case back to lower courts, noting that [Judge] Landrum should not have voiced the reason for excluding jurors instead of prosecutors….The U.S Supreme Court has laid out a complicated, multi-step process for judges to address racial discrimination claims during jury selection.”
In reality, the constitutional process for ensuring race-neutral jury selection is not a complicated, multi-step process. Clearly articulated in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1986 Batson decision, it’s simple: if a defense attorney believes a prosecutor is seeking to use a peremptory jury strike against a potential juror for a racially-biased reason, the defense attorney notifies the judge and offers an explanation as to why there is a concern that the potential juror strike involves racial discrimination. If judge validates that concern, the prosecutor must present a race-neutral reason for seeking the strike. The judge then determines whether the prosecutor has proven that the proposed strike is, indeed, racially-neutral, or whether, as the defense has asserted, it is racially discriminatory, and either allows or disallows the strike.
In its consideration of Jabari Williams’ case, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a terrible Louisiana law that allowed a trial judge to provide the prosecution with the necessary “race-neutral” reason for its requested strikes, a practice that was clearly, on its face, absurd, and, thus, is no longer permitted.
Why get into the weeds on it, holding a short newspaper article to the wall for omitting these details? Maybe because racist jury selection is happening in alarming rates in Louisiana and helps drive the overincarceration of Black people in Louisiana. Maybe because the Louisiana law that was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Jabari Williams’ case proves how extremely out-of-step the state is.
Sledge never connects these dots or even admits that the pattern of discrimination exists as objective fact.. There’s no mention of the Jefferson or Caddo studies, and no mention of a 2010 study of eight states, including Louisiana, that found widespread use of prohibited racially discriminatory practices. He does cite a 2012 study of racial bias in Orleans jury selection, but, although the study is asserted as uncontested fact in filings about Williams from both sides, Sledge refers to the data showing a pattern of discrimination as something “defense attorneys” “said,” refusing to acknowledge it is an objective fact. Both sides, indeed.
Compare these two versions of the new position taken by the government: the Orleans’ prosecutors’ filing states, “counsel for the State have reached the conclusion that there is a compelling prima facie case of racial discrimination based on ‘all relevant circumstances.’” The article, by contrast, states that the prosecutors “filed a court brief agreeing to many of the defense claims, and arguing that reconstructing what happened at the trial would be impossible so many years after the fact.”
The writer moves on to suggest that victims were overlooked in the proceeding, asserting that the DA’s office has failed to make contact with Gonzales’ family in Honduras, even noting there is a nephew who lives in the U.S. The implicit rebuke is clear. The piece ends with warring words between Williams, Cannizzaro, and former Judge Landrum.
The Associated Press wire service covered the decision by running a condensation of the Nola.com piece, ending its piece with. Cannizzaro’s disingenuous claim that no court has found racial discrimination in the case. The Supreme Court’s remand explicitly states that what happened in Williams’ jury seating violated his constitutional rights under Batson. Cannizzaro can split hairs all day, but journalists should not allow his specious commentary to obscure the truth, especially when it’s an important truth about Louisiana’s broken criminal justice system.
This blogpost takes a very deep dive into one criminal justice news story that missed the mark. We went deep, instead of broad, to illustrate how many things were wrong, questionable, and lacking context in this one story, to show how much of a missed opportunity even one bad criminal justice story is. This post was not written to attack one effort, but is meant to be call for future efforts to be more complete. The hometown paper of record’s story on the day that a court accepted the wishes of the Orleans District Attorney’s Office and vacated the conviction and life without parole sentence of Jabari Williams simply did not tell the whole story. And, like so many Louisiana criminal justice stories, especially those out of New Orleans, it’s a story that should be told in full.
