Slow.

Old and ignorant.

Cocky. Con artist. Hostile. Fat.

Those are the words that prosecutor Doug Pullen and his colleague William Smith used to describe the Black jurors that they systematically removed from jury pools, apparently in order to ensure that Johnny Lee Gates—who stood accused of assaulting and murdering 19-year-old white woman Katharina Wright—would face an all-white jury.

Nearly 40 years after Gates was convicted and sentenced to death, his attorneys at the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Georgia Innocence Project have uncovered evidence that they say indicates systemic racial discrimination in Muscogee County, Georgia, in the late 1970s. This discrimination, they argue, led to a spate of Black defendants in capital cases facing all-white juries and being sent to death row.

When Black defendants face all-white juries, they are more likely to be convicted, according to a 2012 study from Duke University. Researchers studied all-white jury pools in Florida and found that they were 16 percent more likely to convict a Black defendant than a white one, a gap that is all but eliminated when at least one of the jurors is Black.

In February, Gates’ attorneys petitioned the Superior Court of Muscogee County to order the State of Georgia to hand over the prosecutors’ jury selection notes from Gates’ trials, as well as notes from other capital trials involving Black defendants in Muscogee County in the late 1970s. After reviewing those notes, a pattern began to emerge.

The notes reveal that the prosecution, Pullen and Smith among them, were blatantly racist in their jury selection process. The prosecution labeled the white prospective jurors as “W” and the Black prospective jurors as “N” and singled out the Black prospective jurors by marking dots in the margins next to their names, according to court documents. They would then use peremptory challenges to remove each Black juror from the jury pool.

Lawyers can use peremptory challenges, also sometimes called peremptory strikes, to remove a potential juror without stating a reason, though they may be required to do so later. The number of strikes allowed varies, but it’s usually somewhere around ten. Prosecutors are not supposed to use peremptory challenges to exclude jurors based on race, but there are ways to do so. In fact, it’s easy for prosecutors to come up with racially neutral reasons for striking a juror that operate as racially discriminatory reasons: All the U.S. Supreme Court requires is that any reason for excluding a particular juror be race neutral, under a 1986 case called Batson v. Kentucky.

The prosecutor can claim that a juror had a poor attitude, or seemed uninterested, nervous, indecisive, bewildered, or unintelligent, and that’s a good enough reason to strike a juror. (All of these reasons have been accepted by federal courts across the country.) Hence Pullen and Smith’s invocation of things like “cocky” and “hostile” as justifications for striking Black jurors.

Unless there is written proof that a prosecutor intentionally eliminated a juror based on race—such as a list of Black jurors with “N” written next to their names—prosecutors are, as Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in his concurring opinion in Batson, “left free to discriminate against Blacks in jury selection provided that they hold the discrimination to an ‘acceptable’ level.”

And this sort of racial discrimination wasn’t limited to Gates’ case. As Gates’ motion for a new trial reads, “From 1976 to 1979, Pullen and Smith prosecuted Black defendants in seven capital cases in Muscogee County. They used peremptory strikes to exclude qualified Black prospective jurors as a matter of policy, thereby ensuring that the Black defendants, including Gates, were tried by all-white juries.”

In one case involving a 16-year-old Black defendant accused of killing a white victim, the Pullen and Smith-led prosecution identified a prospective white juror as a “top juror” because he “has to deal with 150 to 200 of these people that works for his construction co.”

“These people.” I mean, honestly.

In addition, the prosecutors regularly ranked prospective Black jurors as “1” on a scale of 1 to 5 without explaining why. In Gates’ case, for example, they ranked all four prospective Black jurors as “1” without providing a specific explanation. By way of contrast, they ranked only one prospective white juror as “1,” noting that the juror was opposed to the death penalty as the reason.

As the court documents outline, between 1975 and 1979, William Smith was involved in four capital trials involving Black defendants. In three of those trials, the prosecution struck all the prospective Black jurors. In the fourth trial, there were simply too many Black citizens in the jury pool and the prosecutors didn’t have enough peremptory strikes to get rid of them—but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Meanwhile, during that same period, Pullen prosecuted five capital cases involving Black defendants, two of which overlapped with Smith’s. Across all of those five cases, the prosecution struck 27 of 27 prospective Black jurors.

Pullen hadn’t stopped there; his track record of disproportionately striking Black jurors has even gone before the nation’s highest court. In 2016’s Foster v. Chatman, the Supreme Court granted Timothy Foster, a Black defendant sitting on death row, a new trial—thanks, in part, to Pullen’s racially discriminatory practices and his history of a “concerted effort to keep Black prospective jurors off the jury.”

In that case, Pullen had systematically removed all prospective Black jurors from the jury pool in order to obtain an all-white jury. He then stood before the all-white jury and appealed to their racial biases in order to get his death penalty conviction, asking the jury to send Foster to his death in order to “deter other people out there in the projects.”

That was in 1987. Nearly 20 years later, Foster’s attorneys obtained copies of the prosecution’s notes. They showed a similar pattern of racial discrimination as in Gates’ case.

The notes contained four copies of a list of prospective jurors. On each of the four copies, the names of the Black jurors were highlighted in green and marked with the letter “B.” On the juror questionnaires, where prospective jurors had indicated their race, the prosecution had circled the word “Black.” All of the Black jurors were listed on the prosecution’s list of “Definite NOs.” And the prosecution ranked the Black prospective jurors by favorability in case, according to a draft affidavit signed by the prosecution’s investigator, “it comes down to having to pick one of the Black jurors.”

Gates’ attorneys note that Pullen’s discriminatory action in Foster is relevant to Gates’ case: “The fact that Pullen has been found by the Supreme Court to have engaged in race discrimination elsewhere supports a finding of discriminatory intent in this case,” Gates’ attorneys argue in their motion seeking a new trial for their client. It is not clear yet when the court will rule.

The pattern Gates’ attorneys uncovered in their client’s case tracks the pattern uncovered in Foster v. Chatman: Pullen’s policy was to denote Black jurors by race and do everything possible to exclude them from the jury unless he simply had to pick one of the Black jurors, in which case he would pick the least offensive one.

That’s about as blatantly discriminatory as it gets.