Attorneys for the gunman who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket say the federal charges against him should be dropped because there weren’t enough minorities on the grand jury that indicted him. (This reminds me of the old joke about the guy who killed his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.) Via HuffPost:
A judge heard arguments Thursday on Payton Gendron’s claim that the selection process for the grand jury was flawed.
Gendron, who is white, could face the death penalty if convicted in the 2022 mass shooting at a Tops supermarket, which he targeted because of its location in a primarily Black neighborhood. Those killed ranged in age from 32 to 86. Three others were wounded.
He is serving a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole after pleading guilty in November 2022 to multiple state charges, including murder.
A trial on the pending federal hate crime and weapons counts is expected to begin next year.
Gendron’s lawyers argue in a court filing that Black and Hispanic people and men are “systemically and significantly underrepresented” in the lists from which jurors are selected in the Buffalo area.
“To illustrate this point, the grand jury that indicted Payton Gendron was drawn from a pool from which approximately one third of the Black persons expected and one third of the Hispanic/Latino persons expected,” Gendron’s lawyers wrote. Exacerbating the problem, they said, was that the data sources used by a vendor to pull the lists together weren’t preserved.
As a result, Gendron’s legal rights to a grand jury drawn from a fair cross section of the community were violated, they said, so the charges should be dismissed.
