State v. Watkins

The opinion of the Court was delivered by

POLLOCK, J.

At a trial conducted in May 1986, defendant, Ledora Watkins, an eighteen-year-old black woman, was convicted of murder by an all-white jury, and was sentenced to thirty years in State Prison without parole. In an unreported opinion, the Appellate Division affirmed, with one judge dissenting on the issue whether defendant had made a prima facie showing that the prosecutor had improperly exercised his peremptory challenges to exclude all blacks from the jury. The matter is before us as a matter of right. R. 2:2-l(a)(2). We remand it to the Law…