Virginia Sloan [President, The Constitution Project]: "Today, as I observed the oral arguments in Synder v. Louisiana before the United States Supreme Court, I was struck by the fact that James Williams will almost certainly never face a judge, jury, or even a disciplinary panel for his malicious abuse of our criminal justice system. In 1996, Allen Snyder, an African-American man, was sentenced to death for the stabbing of his wife's male companion. After striking all African-Americans from the jury, Mr. Williams – the prosecutor in the case – urged the all-white jury to return a death sentence and not to let Snyder "g[e]t away with it" like O.J. Simpson did.

In September, the Constitution Project — represented by former Solicitor General Seth Waxman – filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Mr. Snyder, concluding that this "provocative and impermissible conduct was powerful evidence of the prosecutor's discriminatory intent to use his peremptory challenges to purge Mr. Snyder's capital jury of all African-Americans," in violation of the Supreme Court's 1986 ruling in Batson v. Kentucky.

In 2006, the Constitution Project's bipartisan Death Penalty Committee, in "Mandatory Justice: The Death Penalty Revisited," urged courts to "vigorously enforc[e] Batson … [and] to ensure that members of all races are part of … petit juries that decide guilt and punishment." The Committee went on to recommend that all "jurisdictions that impose the death penalty should create mechanisms to help ensure that the death penalty is not imposed in a racially discriminatory manner."

Prosecutorial misconduct and racial discrimination are a stain on the reputation of our criminal justice system. Mr. Snyder has – as do all defendants, no matter what their race – a constitutional right to fair treatment under the law. Mr. Williams was apparently not concerned by the fact that a life could be ended in part due to his spiteful manipulation of racial tensions in Louisiana. One can only hope that the Supreme Court is more troubled by this disregard of constitutional rights than he was."