High-profile Georgia lawyers have thrown their weight behind an effort to overturn a decades-old conviction based on the recent discovery that prosecutors in a 1977 murder case allegedly kept African-Americans off the jury and kept track of them by noting the letter “N” beside their names.

An all-white jury convicted Johnny Gates, a black man, of the rape and murder of a white woman and sentenced him to death. After 26 years on death row, he was re-sentenced to life without parole following a remand on an intellectual disability issue.

“He was tried in 1977, before there was any exclusion to the death penalty for intellectual disability,” said his defense attorney, Patrick Mulvaney of the Southern Center for Human Rights. “But that did not end the life sentence he is serving for a conviction based on racial discrimination.”

The revelation, according to Gates' counsel and the amici, came when prosecutors' notes from the 1977 trial were recently produced.

Gates was 21 when he was tried. He is now 62.

The amicus brief, filed Monday, said: “Every black prospective juror in Defendant Johnny Lee Gates's case was labeled with an 'N' to identify their race and assigned the lowest juror ranking in the prosecutors' jury selection notes. Subsequently every qualified black juror was struck by the prosecution so that Mr. Gates, a black man, was tried by an all-white jury. This egregious conduct was not limited to Mr. Gates's case, but formed part of a pattern of racial discrimination infecting jury selection in every death penalty case with a black defendant in Muscogee County from 1975 to 1979.”

“This conduct not only violates the United States and Georgia Constitutions, but also visits tremendous harm upon the judicial system, defendants, prospective jurors, and the community. As former prosecutors, a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia, and a former President of the Georgia State Conference of the NAACP, Amici are committed to advancing a fair and impartial justice system. The conduct presented in Mr. Gates's case is anathema to that goal,” the brief continued. “It must be fully examined on the merits and not swept away as the State desires. The State engaged in systemic racial discrimination, hid the evidence for four decades, and now that this Court has forced that evidence into the open, the State seeks to avoid its examination. The Court should not allow the State to do so.”

The prosecutor was longtime District Attorney Doug Pullen, who later became a judge on the Muscogee County Superior Court. Pullen retired in 2011. He could not immediately be reached  for comment but in at least one recent report denied using any discriminatory practices in his jury selection process as a prosecutor.

Muscogee County District Attorney Julia Slater also could not be immediately reached.

The amici who signed the brief are:

• Larry D. Thompson, deputy U.S. attorney general from 2001 to 2003 and U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1982 to 1986.
• Leah Ward Sears, chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court from 2005 to 2009, presiding justice from 2001 to 2005, and a justice from 1992 to 2001. She is currently a partner at the Atlanta office of Smith, Gambrell & Russell.
• Robert Barr, who represented Georgia's 7th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003, and served as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986 to 1990.
• Jeffrey Brickman, district attorney for DeKalb County in 2004, assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Georgia from 1997 to 2004, and an assistant D.A. in DeKalb County from 1989 to 1997.
• Francys Johnson, a civil rights attorney, pastor, and educator who served as president of the Georgia State Conference of the NAACP from 2013 to 2017.
• Frank C. Winn, district attorney for the Douglas Judicial Circuit from 1983 to 1990. and an assistant D.A. in the Tallapoosa Judicial Circuit from 1978 to 1982.

Mulvaney and co-counsel from the Georgia Innocence Project sought the prosecution's notes for the trial, but didn't see them until March, after Senior Judge John Allen ordered them to be turned over.

On March 2, the state produced its jury notes. They revealed that prosecutors labeled white prospective jurors as “W” and black prospective jurors as “N,” and further singled out black prospective jurors for strikes by marking a dot next to the black prospective jurors' names, the lawyers say. They also say the prosecutors described black prospective jurors in terms such as “slow,” “old + ignorant,” “con artist,” “hostile” and “fat” and described one white prospective juror as a “top juror” because he “has to deal with 150 to 200 of these people that work for his construction co.”

The case is State v. Johnny Lee Gates, No. SU-75-CR-38335.