JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - A divided federal appeals court is sending a Mississippi woman back to death row, reinstating a capital murder conviction previously overturned by federal judges.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday in a 9-5 decision that allegations of racial bias in jury selection were insufficient and shouldn’t have led to Lisa Jo Chamberlin’s sentence being reversed. Chamberlin had never been released from the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Pearl during the appeals.
“The prosecution in Chamberlin’s case did what it was supposed to do: It rejected some black prospective jurors and accepted others, accepted some white prospective jurors and rejected others. When asked why it struck individual black prospective jurors, it gave specific race-neutral reasons for the strikes,” Judge Edith Clement wrote for the majority. “The Mississippi Supreme Court found on multiple occasions that the prosecution did not invidiously discriminate against black prospective jurors.”
The case involves a grisly 2004 double murder for which Chamberlin was convicted. She challenged the prosecution’s striking of some black candidates from the jury that convicted her in the Hattiesburg murders of Linda Heintzelman and Heintzelman’s boyfriend, Vernon Hulett.
Evidence showed the victims were killed after they argued with Chamberlin and her then-boyfriend, Roger Gillett, at a home they all shared. Hulett was hit in the head with a hammer and his throat was slashed. Heintzelman was abandoned after being strangled and stabbed. When her assailants returned to find she still breathing, she was suffocated with plastic bags. Hulett was decapitated. The bodies were stuffed in a freezer and taken to Kansas, where Gillett and Chamberlin were arrested after state agents raided an abandoned farm house near the city of Russell.
Gillett and Chamberlin were convicted in separate trials. At Chamberlin’s trial, more black people than white were rejected from the jury pool. Lawyers for Chamberlin alleged unconstitutional racial bias. U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, and then a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit voted to grant Chamberlin a new trial. But the full 15-member court granted the state’s request for a rehearing.
Judge Gregg Costa, among the judges who originally voted to give Chamberlin a new trial, wrote for dissenters. He said despite much contention over discriminatory juror strikes in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, the majority was crippling the only way available to legally challenge it, a comparative analysis of jurors who were kept and dismissed.
“Today’s opinion saps most of the force out of this one tool that has ever resulted in us finding a Batson violation,” Costa wrote. “Despite the only reasons cited at trial for striking two black jurors applying equally to an accepted white juror, the majority rejects the direct conclusion to be drawn from this inconsistency that the proffered reasons could not have been the real reasons for the strikes.”
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