Confederate imagery in courtroom leads to new trial

The jury chamber in the Giles County courthouse in Tennessee featured a giant window with a soaring library, but it had another striking detail: a portrait of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, and other Confederate memorabilia.

A Tennessee appeals court unanimously ruled Friday that a Black man convicted of aggravated assault and other charges by an all-white jury should get a new trial, saying prosecutors failed to rebut a claim made by defense lawyers that the room where the jury deliberated was prejudicial to the man, Tim Gilbert.

The decision was issued amid a broader rethinking of the symbols that dot town squares, universities and courthouses across the United States. It also comes amid a greater awareness about racial bias in the criminal justice system.

Gilbert, 56, who was arrested in 2018, and his lawyer argued that having both the grand jury and the trial jury deliberate in the “inherently prejudicial” room — which had been named after the United Daughters of the Confederacy — violated his right to a fair trial, an impartial jury, due process and equal protection, according to court documents.

The three-judge appeals court agreed and reversed a 2020 lower court ruling that denied Gilbert’s request for a new trial. The appeals court ruling discussed the power of symbols, flags in particular, to communicate messages about a government’s identity and values.

“The flag displayed in the jury room is no different,” the court ruled. “Its original purpose was to ‘knit the loyalty’ of those in the Confederate states ‘to a flag’ that conveyed the political ideals of the Confederacy.”

The ruling explored the ideals of the Confederacy by examining documents created at the time of the rebel government’s founding. Articles of secession identified the reasons behind the decision of the Confederate states to leave the union, the ruling said, and considered the right to hold Black people in chattel slavery as central to Southern life.

Valena Beety, a law professor and deputy director of the Academy for Justice at Arizona State University, said that courts are now more aware about how bias could be introduced into the criminal justice system and are more eager to try to stamp it out.