Were the jurors rejected because they were black? The Supreme Court will not review.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a jury selection case that defense attorneys hoped would prevent prosecutors and defense attorneys from excluding people from juries solely because of their race and gender.

The court has rejected a motion to hear the question of whether a Georgia prosecutor wrongly excluded blacks and women from a jury that sentenced a black man to death for murdering a white woman during an attempted robbery.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor said they would reverse a lower court that found no error.

In the dissent, which Sotomayor joined, Jackson wrote that the Georgia Supreme Court “ignored highly relevant facts about the prosecutor’s discriminatory conduct in striking and his antipathy to the legal standards that apply to such conduct.”

“Instead, the state court made a narrow assessment of the prosecutor’s strikes that failed to consider relevant context,” Jackson wrote.

Anna Arceneaux, one of the lawyers for convicted felon Warren King, said the Supreme Court should take action to enforce a basic constitutional principle.

“Race and gender discrimination have no role in our criminal justice system, certainly not when a man’s life is at stake,” Arceneaux said in a statement.

His attorneys said the prosecutor used false or inconsistent reasons to dismiss potential jurors when he dismissed nearly all blacks and few whites, all women. When challenged, the prosecutor sharply criticized the 1986 Supreme Court decision, Batson v. Kentucky, which held that a juror could not be dismissed solely on the basis of race.

King’s attorneys called it “an extraordinary case in which the record clearly establishes discrimination.”

The Georgia attorney general responded that a “reasonable review of the record” indicates that the reason for the jury dismissal was not race.

Georgia Supreme Court sides with prosecutor and split judge in Atlanta-based case 11^t The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the decision.

But courts are giving only cursory scrutiny to whether the landmark 1986 ruling is being followed, according to the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

“Georgia prosecutors have routinely used mandatory prison sentences in ways that raise constitutional questions, including by sentencing all eligible black people or sentencing only eligible black people,” they told the Supreme Court.

Stephen Bright, an expert on racial discrimination in jury selection, recently wrote that most studies of jury selection show that prosecutors disproportionately use their discretion to exclude black jurors.

“Black citizens are often completely or significantly underrepresented on juries, especially in death penalty cases,” Bright wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post.

Bright said the Supreme Court had an opportunity to “send a message to prosecutors across the country that this abhorrent practice is unacceptable.”

King, then 18, was arrested in 1994 for the murder of Karen Crosby, a grocery store clerk. King’s cousin, Walter Smith, was also arrested.

Both King and Smith blamed each other for the Crosby shooting.

Under a plea agreement, Smith testified against King and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Patricia McTier, one of the black women removed from King’s jury, recently wrote that she was surprised to later learn that the prosecutor had argued that she would be biased because her husband’s relative had been charged with aggravated assault. McTier said she knew nothing about her husband’s distant cousin and was not asked about it during jury selection.

McTier wrote in an op-ed for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she was “deeply disturbed” that King faces execution “after a trial marked by such blatant racial discrimination.”

“I don’t know what verdict I would have rendered in this case,” she wrote, “but I do know that justice was not served by the prosecutor’s efforts to remove black people from the jury pool.”