Montgomery -- The Alabama Supreme Court reinstated Friday, August 29, 1997, the capital murder conviction of a Morgan County man who had successfully argued that prosecutors wrongly excluded blacks from serving as head of the grand jury that indicted him.

In a 7 - 1 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that Levi Pace had proven that Morgan County engaged in a lengthy history of racial discrimination in the selection of grand jury forepersons. But the majority ruled also that the discrimination did not amount to a "plain error" that violated Pace's rights.

The court reversed a ruling by the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals that overturned Pace's conviction.

Because of the racial discrimination, Pace's constitutional right to equal protection was violated, the Supreme Court ruled. But Pace did not file a timely motion to quash his indictment on that basis.

Note: The court holds litigants to strict time constraints, often to their determent, while the court is free to rule unabated.

• Jury forepeople are chosen after a grand jury is empaneled. There was no question in Pace's case that the grand jury was properly constituted, so the fact that the foreperson was wrongly chosen was not a severe error.
• The role of the foreperson in Alabama courts is largely a clerical position with little power to affect the outcome of a grand jury.

"Although we hold that no plain error occurred in the case, we are none-the-less adamant in our view that racial discrimination of any kind is utterly repugnant to the judicial process," Butts wrote.

Pace was convicted and sentenced to death in the 1991 killing of night motel clerk Jerry Wayne Hargrove during a robbery of the Decatur Days Inn. Pace once worked at the motel as a work release inmate.