Supreme Court keeps Texas inmate on death row despite objections from bench

Texas inmate James Broadnax will remain on death row without a new trial after the Supreme Court denied his petition Monday. In a new order list, the court said it was declining to hear Broadnax vs. Texas, despite objections from Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. They both said they “would reverse the judgment” of the state’s highest criminal court, the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals. Broadnax, a Black man, was convicted of capital murder in 2009 for the fatal shooting of Stephen Swan and Matthew Butler, two Christian music producers. He was sentenced to death by a nearly all-white jury in Dallas when he was 20. Broadnax filed a petition to the Supreme Court in October, saying that the trial violated his constitutional right to a jury without racial bias. During jury selection in Broadnax’s case, the prosecution used nearly half of its peremptory strikes to remove all seven Black prospective jurors from the pool. One was eventually reseated after the trial judge granted Broadnax’s challenge, citing “the fact that there are no African American jurors on this jury and there was a disproportionate number of African Americans who were struck.” In 1986, the Supreme Court decided Batson...