This Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider the case of Charles Rhines, a gay man on death row in South Dakota who is asking the Supreme Court to accept his case because anti-gay bias and stereotypes affected the jurors who sentenced him to death. The evidence shows that some jurors expressed a desire to prevent Mr. Rhines from serving a life sentence “with men in prison” and discussed how “if he’s gay we’d be sending him where he wants to go if we voted for [life in prison].”
In a piece for ThinkProgress, Alan Pyke discusses how Mr. Rhines’s sexual orientation was a focal point for some jurors during deliberations:
The jury’s ugly prejudices were clear to the original sentencing court at the time. As they deliberated sentencing, jurors sent a list of questions to the judge that centered on concerns that he might somehow enjoy prison.
The questions included “whether he would be allowed to ‘mix with the general inmate population,’ ‘create a group of followers or admirers,’ ‘brag about his crime to other inmates, especially new and[/]or young men…,’ ‘marry or have conjugal visits,’ or ‘have a cellmate…'”.
Two recent Supreme Court decisions, Buck v. Davis and Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado, have made clear that racial bias cannot be allowed to infect jury deliberations. In a powerful op-ed for the American Constitution Society, Richard N. Lorenc, Executive Vice President of the Foundation for Economic Education and Chair of the Board of Directors of America’s Future Foundation, argues the same should hold true when it comes to anti-gay bias in the courtroom:
Prejudice based on sexual orientation is long-standing and deeply rooted in American life, as is prejudice based on race. Given our country’s history, it is imperative that we continue to work to eliminate discrimination of all kinds from our criminal justice system.
In the Supreme Court’s 2017 decision addressing racial bias in Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado, Justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this result “ensure[d] that our legal system remains capable of coming ever closer to the promise of equal treatment under the law.”
The jurors selected to hear Mr. Rhines’s case said they could be fair and free of prejudice. This was not true. As Mr. Lorenc aptly states:
[A] juror’s desire to prevent Mr. Rhines from having sex with other men cannot stand as a deciding factor for sentencing him to death.
The Supreme Court should accept this case and correct this clear violation of Mr. Rhines’s constitutional rights.