Decades-old death penalty retrial pushed back again
♦ A court software change delays the jury list for the Timothy Tyrone Foster murder case.
Scheduled hearings to push forward a now 34-year-old death penalty case have been postponed until the beginning of 2021.
Timothy Tyrone Foster was sentenced to death in 1987 for the murder and molestation of retired school teacher Queen Madge White during a burglary at her home at Highland Circle. However, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 2016, saying the district attorney at that time had systematically excluded black jurors.
The reason for the latest delay in the retrial is about as mundane as it gets. Floyd County’s case management system is being moved over to a new one, and the list of possible jurors who could serve in the case isn’t available. Timothy
Davlon Ezell, director of Tyrone
Superior Court Receiver and Foster
Jury Management, said the court system is changing over to ICON case management software. Her staff is in the process of training on the new system.
Foster’s attorneys requested to postpone the pretrial hearings that were originally scheduled to begin on Oct. 5.
“The state voiced no objection to continuing these hearings,” read the order penned by Superior Court Judge Billy Sparks, “and the court is aware of delays in providing the master jury list and the other information requested by the defendant due to the clerk’s ongoing transition to the ICON case management and jury management system.”
One of the primary motions to be heard by the court is a challenge to that jury pool.
Foster, who is now 52, was 18 at the time of the murder.
His case had been appealed a number of times on the state level before getting to the Supreme Court, which cited Batson v. Kentucky in its ruling. That precedent — set just prior to Foster’s original trial — holds that prosecutors cannot strike potential jurors on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex.
After his conviction was overturned, Foster was brought to the Floyd County Jail in March 2017 from Georgia’s death row in Jackson. In 2018, the state expressed its intent to seek the death penalty and the process to try him for murder began again.
There will be some difficulties presenting the case for trial. Original case files have been lost, only copies remain. Many, if not most, witnesses have died or face health issues.
In December 2019, Judge Sparks set a tentative date for Foster’s retrial at January 2021. However, a six month-long hiatus in jury trials under a Georgia Supreme Court COVID-19 emergency order, along with the most recent delay, will push the trial later in the year.
The hearings are scheduled to begin on January 25, 2021 and continue until finalized. Once local hearings are finalized, the case goes up to the Georgia high court for review before it goes to trial.