An Alameda County man who was sentenced to death in 2005 for the murder and robbery of Lorin Gwynne Germaine in 1986 is challenging his conviction and sentence because prosecutors in his trial removed two prospective jurors because they were Jewish, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The challenge by Mark Schmeck, whose conviction the state Supreme Court unanimously upheld in 2005, got new life since U.S. Federal District Court Judge Vince Chhabria last month ordered the Alameda County District Attorney’s office to review all 35 death sentences imposed in the county in the past 30 years for evidence that prosecutors systematically removed Black and Jewish people from serving on a jury.
Chhabria is hearing an appeal by Ernest Dykes, who was convicted and sentenced in 1995 for the attempted murder of Bernice Clark and the murder of her 9-year-old grandson Lance Clark during an attempted robbery in 1993. He ordered the review in April when the DA’s office disclosed notes they had found in the files indicating that prosecutors had deliberately excluded Jewish and Black female individuals from Dykes’ jury pool.
“The Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to a trial by an impartial jury of one’s peers,” Alameda County District Attorney Pamela stated in a press release. “Any practice by prosecutors to eliminate potential jurors because of their race betrays that core pillar of the criminal justice system. As the Ninth Circuit has pointed out, ‘It does not matter that the prosecutor might have had good reasons to strike the prospective jurors. What matters is the real reason they were stricken.”