Thurgood Marshall

“ Our cases recognize that, under certain circumstances, exposure to particularly inflammatory publicity creates so strong a presumption of prejudice that "the jurors' claims that they can be impartial should not be believed." ”

“ The majority's reasoning is unacceptable. When a prospective juror has been exposed to prejudicial pretrial publicity, a trial court cannot realistically assess the juror's impartiality without first establishing what the juror already has learned about the case. The procedures employed in this case were wholly insufficient to eliminate the risk that two-thirds of Mu'Min's jury entered the jury box predisposed against him. ”

“ An individual exposed to publicity qualitatively akin to the publicity at issue in Irvin and Rideau is necessarily disqualified from jury service no matter how earnestly he professes his impartiality. [2] But unless the trial court asks a prospective juror exactly what he has read or heard about a case, the court will not be able to determine whether the juror comes within this class. Cf. Murphy v. Florida, supra, 421 U.S., at 800-802, 95 S.Ct., at 2036-37 (performing careful analysis of content of pretrial publicity to which jurors had been exposed before rejecting impartiality challenge) ”

“ The question before us is whether, in light of the charged atmosphere that surrounded this case, the trial court was constitutionally obliged to ask the eight jurors who admitted exposure to pretrial publicity to identify precisely what they had read, seen, or heard. The majority answers this question in the negative. According to the majority, the trial court need ask no more of a prospective juror who has admitted exposure to pretrial publicity than whether that prospective juror views himself as impartial. ”

“ For instance, in Irvin v. Dowd, supra, we concluded that a capital defendant was constitutionally entitled to a change of venue because no one who had been exposed to the inflammatory media descriptions of his crime and confession could possibly have fairly judged his case, and because this publicity had saturated the community in which the defendant was on trial. ”

“ The majority's observation is completely beside the point. Regardless of how widely disseminated news of the charges against Mu'Min might have been, the simple fact of the matter is that two-thirds of the persons on Mu'Min's jury admitted having read or heard about the case. While the majority carefully avoids any discussion of the specific nature of the pretrial publicity, it is impossible to assess fairly Mu'Min's claim without first examining precisely what was written about the case prior to trial. ”

“ Indeed, readers learned that the murder of Nopwasky could have been avoided if the State had been permitted to seek the death penalty in Mu'Min's 1973 murder case. In a story headlined "Mu'Min avoided death for 1973 murder in Va.," one paper reported that but for this Court's decision a year earlier in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 92 S.Ct. 2726, 33 L.Ed.2d 346 (1972) , which temporarily invalidated the death penalty, the prosecutor at the earlier trial "would have had a case of capital murder." ”

“ We think that it would be far more injurious to permit it to be thought that persons entertaining a disqualifying prejudice were allowed to serve as jurors and that inquiries designed to elicit the fact of disqualification were barred. ”

“ Several weeks later, Mu'Min, an inmate serving a 48-year sentence for first-degree murder, was indicted for murdering Nopwasky. Facts developed at trial established that Mu'Min had committed the murder after escaping from the site of a Virginia Department of Transportation work detail. See 239 Va. 433, 437-438, 389 S.E.2d 886, 889-890 (1990) .
The circumstances of the murder generated intense local interest and political controversy. The press focused on the gross negligence of the corrections officials responsible for overseeing the work detail from which Mu'Min had escaped. ”

“ Much of the pretrial publicity was of the type long thought to be uniquely destructive of a juror's ability to maintain an open mind about a case-in particular, reports of Mu'Min's confession, see Nebraska Press Assn. v. Stuart, 427 U.S., at 541, 563, 96 S.Ct., at 2794, 2804; id., at 602, 96 S.Ct., at 2823 (Brennan, J., concurring in judgment) ; Rideau v. Louisiana, supra, Irvin v. Dowd, supra, 366 U.S., at 725-726, 81 S.Ct., at 1644; statements by prominent public officials attesting to Mu'Min's guilt, see Nebraska Press Assn. v. ”