A divided California Supreme Court upheld a Black man’s death sentence Thursday for raping and murdering a young white woman in Kern County, rejecting arguments by dissenting justices that the prosecutor engaged in racial discrimination by removing the only Black juror without stating his reasons.
Larry Hazlett, then 31, was convicted of murdering Tana Woolley, a 20-year-old local beauty queen who was sexually assaulted and strangled in 1978 in her apartment in the town of Rosamond, the apartment complex where Hazlett also lived. The case went unsolved for 25 years before investigators, using newly developed technology, detected Hazlett’s DNA in stains on the victim’s bed and on a sock wrapped around her neck.
During jury selection at Hazlett’s trial in 2004, the prosecutor asked the only prospective Black member of the panel whether the fact that the defendant was Black and the victim was white would affect her verdict, and she said it would not…