Tennessee court grants new trial for Black man

All-white jury had deliberated in a room with Confederate symbols

A Black man whose fate was decided by an all-white jury that deliberated in a room containing Confederate symbols will receive a new trial after a Criminal Appeals Court ruling in Tennessee.

Tim Gilbert was sentenced in June 2020 to six years in prison for aggravated assault and other charges connected with a 2018 altercation in Giles County, about 130 miles west of Chattanooga. But Gilbert and his attorney argued the symbols on display at the Giles County courthouse, the jury’s racial makeup and specific evidence allowed by the judge violated his right to a fair trial.

Unbeknownst to Gilbert or his attorney at the time of the trial, the jury considered whether Gilbert was innocent or guilty in a room where an antique Confederate flag and a portrait of Confederate President Jefferson Davis hung.

The room, decorated with other related memorabilia, is also named for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the organization founded in the 1890s in Nashville to memorialize Civil War ancestors and memorials.

The ruling, issued Friday, found Gilbert’s defense provided enough evidence to show how a jury could be influenced while deliberating in such a room, while also making it clear Tennessee’s attorneys didn’t adequately respond to the allegations.

“To determine the political ideals of the Confederacy that could be conveyed by the flag in this case, we look to documents created at the time of its founding,” the court wrote. “At the time they adopted the various Articles of Secession, each of the Confederate states publicly identified the reasons behind the decision to secede from the Union, and the documents published by the Confederate states identified the right to hold black people in chattel slavery as central to the Southern way of life and, thus, paramount among those justifications. These documents not only defended slavery, but endorsed it fully using dehumanizing and racist language.”

The court wrote, “We have concluded that the defendant is entitled to a new trial based upon the jury’s exposure to extraneous prejudicial information.”

In conjunction with the issue regarding the jury’s deliberation room, the appeals court found the trial court allowed a statement that should have been otherwise inadmissible.

The appeal court’s ruling comes over a year after a Tennessee circuit judge denied Gilbert’s motion for a new trial.

The county seat of Giles County is Pulaski, where the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866.