Legal Luminaries Back Appeal in Grayson County Capital Case

A host of Texas judicial luminaries are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review a 2004 North Texas triple-murder case the court had on its conference agenda Thursday, arguing that the seating of jurors who explicitly admitted racial bias should be grounds to reverse the death penalty they delivered in the case.The certiorari petition challenges the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals’ denial last year of Thomas’s habeas corpus petition. The petition, docketed last September 22, has been rescheduled at least 13 times since it was first distributed for the court’s conference January 7. The court relisted the petition for its conference this week.A central issue in the certiorari petition is whether Andre Lee Thomas’s right to a fair trial was jeopardized by three jurors who expressed moral objections to interracial marriage. Thomas, who is Black, admitted killing his estranged wife, who was white, as well as their four-year-old son and her 13-month-old daughter. The all-white Grayson County jury sentenced him to death specifically for the murder of his stepdaughter, Leyha Marie Hughes.This case, horrifying in its detail, brings together race and its allegation of jury contamination because of it, in a town still stained by the 1930 mob killing…