WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court, adding new weight to a century-old precedent, threw out a 23-year-old murder conviction Tuesday because blacks had been intentionally excluded from the grand jury that leveled the charge.
Splitting 6-3, the justices refused to reinstate the California murder conviction of Booker Hillery Jr., who won a new trial in 1983, 21 years after the March 1962 murder of 15-year-old Marlene Miller.
Trial testimony showed Hillery -- who was on parole for a rape conviction -- stabbed the Hanford, Calif., girl in the throat with the scissors she was using to make a party dress.
According to court documents, no black had ever been selected for a grand jury in Kings County until 1963, the year after Hillery was indicted, and a federal court found in 1983 that blacks had been systematically excluded from the grand juries.
Writing for the majority, Justice Thurgood Marshall said the court has held since 1880 that blacks could not be intentionally excluded from grand juries and, if they are, any conviction based on indictments from such panels must be reversed. Marshall said the court saw no reason to change that view.
Marshall, the only black on the high court, said that 'intentional discrimination in the selection of grand jurors is a grave constitutional trespass.'
Justice Lewis Powell, joined by Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice William Rehnquist, dissented from the ruling, saying that the remedy -- a new trial more than two decades after the crime -- was too severe.
Countering those arguments, Marshall wrote, 'The remedy for this violation is not disproportionate to the evil that it seeks to deter.
'If grand jury discrimination becomes a thing of the past, no conviction will ever again be lost on account of it.'
Federal law and legal precedent do not require that juries include minorities, but minorities must be in the pool from which the pool is selected and cannot systematically be excluded from jury duty.
In other actions Tuesday, the court:
-Ruled unanimously in a case from Sarasota, Fla., that David Wayne Greenfield's decision to remain silent after his arrest may not be used as evidence of his sanity at the time of the crime.
-Also unanimously, ruled that the Customs Bureau did not violate the due process rights of John von Neumann, an automobile dealer, when it seized a 1974 Jaguar he was transporting over the U.S.-Canadian border.
William George Prahl, California deputy attorney general whose office brought the Hillery case to the high court, said he was shocked by the decision. Acknowledging Kings County 'was not as quick as it should have been in recognizing the suitablity of blacks to serve on grand juries,' and 'that was wrong,' Prahl said, 'You don't remedy it by throwing out the conviction.'
'This kind of decision destroys people's faith in legal system,' Prahl said.
Kings County District Attorney Robert Maline said it will take several days before he decides whether his office will put Hillery on trial again.
Prahl said putting together a new trial in such an old case is extremely difficult and expensive, but said he doubted Hillery -- who is still in prison -- would 'be back on the streets.'
'The girl's mother and father are well along in years and to have this memory brought back again and putting them through another trial is inhuman, simply inhuman,' he said.
