SEATTLE — The Washington Supreme Court has unanimously overturned the rape conviction of a Black man in King County, finding the trial judge improperly turned aside objections from the man’s lawyer, who claimed prosecutors may have dismissed two prospective jurors of color due to racial bias.
The justices, in a 21-page opinion invoking a state judicial rule that’s the first of its kind nationwide, vacated Amanuel Tesfasilasye’s third-degree rape conviction and sent his case back to King County Superior Court to be retried, settled by plea agreement or dismissed.
The ruling overturned an opinion by Division I of the Washington Court of Appeals, which had upheld the trial court’s rulings and Tesfasilasye’s conviction.
Chief Justice Steven González wrote that the lower courts had misapplied the standard that the Supreme Court had adopted in its test to determine whether race could have been a factor in the decision by prosecutors to strike those two prospective jurors from the jury pool.
“Racial bias has long infected our jury selection process,” González wrote, explaining that the Supreme Court in 2018 adopted a rule making discrimination during the process more difficult. The final rule, called General Rule 37 (GR37), was the result of years of negotiations and hearings, according to a “friend of the court” brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, the King County Department of Public Defense and others.
Tesfasilasye was represented by attorneys from the Washington Appellate Project.
Gregory Link, the project’s director, said his organization is seeing more challenges to the jury selection process since GR37 took effect three years ago.
“This rule is one-of-a-kind, and a long time in the making,” he said. “It adds another accountability tool to the system.”
The rule applies to a portion of the jury selection process called “peremptory challenges” which, González explained, “parties may use … to strike a limited number of otherwise qualified jurors from the venire” without explanation. “These challenges have a history of being used based largely or entirely on racial stereotypes or generalizations,” he wrote.
When an attorney invokes a GR37 objection to a peremptory challenge, the trial judge is required to deny the challenge if, given the circumstances, they determine that an “objective observer could view race or ethnicity as a factor” in making the challenge.
Under the Supreme Court rule, an “objective observer” is someone “who is aware that implicit, institutional and unconscious biases, in addition to purposeful discrimination, have resulted in the unfair exclusion of potential jurors in Washington State.”
In Tesfasilasye’s case, King County prosecutors challenged and struck from the jury an Asian woman and Latino man over the GR37 objection of Tesfasilasye’s defense attorney.
The justices said the trial judge rejected those objections after concluding King County Superior Court Judge Kristin Richardson “did not believe an objective observer ‘would think’ that this was a race base challenged,” González wrote.
“GR37 is clear, the court’s determination should be based on whether an objective observer ‘could’ view race as a factor, not whether it would,” he concluded.
Tesfasilasye worked in 2017 as a driver for Solid Ground, a company that contracts with King County Access Transportation to transport people living with disabilities, according to court documents. A county transportation client claimed Tesfasilasye took her to her door, as was common practice, then followed her inside and sexually assaulted her, court documents say.
Tesfasilasye was convicted of third-degree rape and sentenced to one year in jail.
