Appeals court orders new trial

Lawrence Mosely must get a new trial, after the Cole County prosecutor's office wrongly removed a potential juror, the state appeals court in Kansas City ruled Tuesday.

A Cole County jury convicted Moseley, now 34, in January 2016 of two counts of distributing marijuana - and Circuit Judge Dan Green sentenced him to 12 years on each count, to be served at the same time.

Evidence during his January 2016 trial included an undercover Highway Patrol officer's testimony that he twice paid Mosely $130 for a bag of marijuana, on two different dates and at two different places in Jefferson City.

In its 11-page ruling, written by Judge Cynthia Martin, the three-judge appeals court panel noted Mosely - who is black - challenged "the fact that he was convicted by an all-white jury."

The appeals court ruled the prosecution cut two potential black jurors from serving on Mosely's trial jury - and one of those cuts was because of her race, violating a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that race can't be a factor in deciding to keep someone on the jury or striking them from the list of potential jurors.

In selecting juries, lawyers for both sides are allowed to eliminate some people from the final jury based on their answers to questionnaires, or to questions asked during the jury-selection process at the beginning of a trial.

The intention is to have a jury that doesn't pre-judge the case and isn't biased by factors outside of the facts of the trial - such as a potential juror's knowing the defendant, a witness or an attorney in the case.

However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling said the reasons for the decision to "strike" someone from the jury list must be "race-neutral."

When there's a challenge to removing a potential juror, a Missouri Supreme Court ruling requires the trial court to go through a process to determine if the "strike" was for a legitimate reason or was race-based.

In Mosely's case, the appeals court said, his attorney raised the question of race as an issue in the case during the jury-selection process.

"Looking around the room, there's quite a lot of white people sitting here, and I expect that (Mosely) worries that he might be judged on the color of his skin," the lawyer said, according to the trial transcript. "Does anybody understand where he's coming from?"

A woman in the jury pool responded: "I'm African-American, too. You shouldn't be judged by your peers, but it's predominately white in here."

The transcript shows Green then asked her, "How do you feel sitting in a room that is predominately filled with white people?"

She answered, "I grew up here, so I deal with it every day."

Mosely's attorney objected to the prosecution's striking the woman from the pool, and the state told Green it was because "she indicated clearly that she would understand the defendant's position of being prejudged because of her status here and living in the county."

The appeals court said Green should have rejected the prosecutor's explanation, because the decision to strike the woman from the jury "because of her status here" showed the strike was "because of her status as an African-American."

Justin Carver heads Cole County's public defender's office, and told the News Tribune Tuesday: "Tax dollars are wasted when a case has to be retried."

However, he added, Mosely's case is one of a number his office has appealed, based on "a pattern of problems we have seen" in the Cole County prosecutor's office removing people who are black from jury panels.

In a three-page "Open Letter" to Cole County Prosecutor Mark Richardson, Carver listed several examples of cases with black defendants, he said, showed the "pattern" he sees in the prosecutor's office:

In a case where self-defense was an issue, a potential black juror was struck from the panel for saying he would protect himself if threatened, while Caucasians making similar statements were kept on the panel.

A black woman, who did not answer questions during jury selection, was struck because she works for the state, but "in Cole County, it is common to have state employees called in for jury service, and your office does not routinely strike them because they work for the state," and other potential jurors were kept even though they didn't answer any questions.

Three potential black jurors were removed from a panel "because they stated that they knew someone in the courtroom," while Caucasians saying the same thing were not struck.

Richardson generally declines to comment while a case remains active, and neither he nor the attorney general's office - which represented Richardson's office in the appeals court - responded to a request for comment Tuesday.

Carver said, "If we want defendants to trust the justice system, they have to feel like they were treated fairly."

In his open letter, he reminded Richardson: "Strikes made during jury selection take place outside of the public's eye. When community members are unfairly excluded from jury service, and when criminal convictions are being reversed, I think the community deserves to know what is happening and why."