A jury convicted a Black man in a Tennessee jury room decked out in Confederate portraits, flags, and memorabilia, and a panel of high-ranking Tennessee judges ruled that this is perfectly fine.
The Tennessee Criminal Court of Appeals failed to grant a new trial to Barry Jamal Martin, in an opinion made public Tuesday. The appeal came from a conviction from the Giles County Circuit Court. Pulaski, the Giles County seat, is known as the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and Martin’s jury deliberated his fate in what court papers call, simply, “the Confederate Room.”
Martin was convicted of possession of cocaine, cannabis, and drug paraphernalia and sentenced to 12 years in confinement. His attorney argued he should get a new trial for many legal reasons concerning evidence, trial errors, and more. But his attorney also argued Martin should be given a new trial because jurors sitting in the “Confederate Room” were exposed to racist ideas that could have swayed their decisions.
The frosted-glass top panel of the jury room door displayed the Confederate flag and read “U.D.C. Room” in gold lettering beneath. “U.D.C” stands for United Daughters of the Confederacy, the group that supplied the memorabilia for the room. The room had two Confederate flags, portraits of Confederate leaders, and Confederate documents.
In June, Giles County and the UDC successfully won approval from the Tennessee Historical Commission to move the items from the jury room to the National Confederate Museum in the Elm Springs mansion outside of Columbia. It wasn’t immediately clear if the items had already been moved or not.
The move to remove the Confederate memorabilia came after another Black man, Tim Gilbert, won a new trial in December, arguing that the jury in his case was influenced by the items in the room. A different panel of judges with the Tennessee Court of Appeals approved the new trial and vacated his conviction.
That court decided the Confederate flag communicated Black subjugation, was government speech because it was displayed in a government courthouse, and that speech exposed the jury in the Gilbert case to “improper outside influence.”
But in the Martin case, a different panel of Appeals Court judges disagreed. Its ruling said that the “the memorabilia in the jury room did not pertain to the defendant, to any fact of the case,” or to other rules that apply to a criminal trial. Further, the panel said they questioned “whether the average citizen would recognize the portraits of Jefferson Davis or John C. Brown, the insignia for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or the third national flag of the Confederate States of America.” However, the well-known Confederate battle flag was framed and on display in the room.
“While we certainly do not condone the presence of the memorabilia in the jury room, we conclude that the defendant failed to show that any specific extraneous prejudicial information was improperly brought to the jury’s attention or improperly brought to bear upon any juror (or grand juror),” reads the opinion. “Therefore, no unequivocal rule of law was breached.”
The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said Wednesday the ruling could hinder justice for other Black defendants in the future.
“The idea that a Black defendant could receive a fair trial in a room adorned with symbols of white supremacy and slavery is preposterous, and that fact should have been recognized by the court,” said CAIR national communications director Ibrahim Hooper. “This ruling may unfortunately prevent a necessary reexamination of possible unjust, biased convictions of Black defendants.”
