(CN) — In an bid to overturn his negligent homicide conviction, a former Aurora, Colorado police officer claimed Tuesday the judge in his trial over the death of an unarmed Black man he arrested allowed the prosecution to exclude a white woman from the jury based on her race during jury selection.
Lucas Lorenz, an attorney for Randy Roedema, argued to a state court of appeals that Adams County District Judge Mark Warner botched his decision on the defense’s challenge to the prosecution’s peremptory strikes of 10 white jurors. Warner had found that the prosecution had no race-neutral reason to strike one white woman from the panel and that there was no pattern of excluding white jurors.
“The ultimate conclusion by the trial court overruling the Batson challenge, that was error,” Lorenz told the three-judge panel at the Denver hearing. “The actual substantive finding, which was not changed, substantiates the Batson challenge.”…