Commonwealth v. Harris

I dissent from part 1 of the majority opinion. Because of the prosecutor’s shameful and flagrant misuse of the peremptory challenge to exclude a juror solely on the basis of race, the defendant did not receive a fair trial. I am shocked that in this day and age (long after the noted trilogy of cases in this area1 1) prosecutors are still challenging persons peremptorily for no reason other than their ethnicity. See, e.g., Commonwealth v. Brown, 11 Mass. App. Ct. 288, 293-295 (1981). This is improper and immoral, apart from being unconstitutional.2

The flimsy excuses3 offered here were so…