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Defense asks Supreme Court to scrutinize peremptory strike after juror said ‘police don’t always tell the truth’
Summary
At oral argument in Commonwealth v. Almeda, defense counsel Robert Shaw told the state Supreme Court that a prosecutor’s peremptory strike of prospective juror 101 rested on a mischaracterization of the juror’s answers and risked masking a race-based exclusion; the Commonwealth defended the judge’s assessment of credibility.
At oral argument in Commonwealth v. Aaron Almeda, defense attorney Robert Shaw told the Supreme Court that a prosecutor’s peremptory strike of prospective juror 101 was legally inadequate because it rested on a mischaracterization of the juror’s answers and did not meet the test of being an “adequate and genuine” race-neutral explanation.
Shaw said the juror had stated — accurately, in Shaw’s view — that “police don’t always tell the truth” and that his awareness came from news reports and other community information, not personal experience. Shaw argued that the prosecutor mischaracterized that answer as coming from a TV show and that the strike therefore lacked specificity as required by Batson-related standards. “He was asked a question about evaluating the credibility of police officers,” Shaw told the court, “and in…
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