This is a story about a racist word and how the courts prevented a jury from hearing that a witness had used it. It’s also a family publication, so we’ll leave some of the details to the reader’s imagination.

The case comes from Concord, where a teenager named Michael said he was beaten and robbed by several men in his home in April 2007. He identified one of the robbers as Marc Anthony Bryant. But another teenager who was with Michael did not identify Bryant in a police photo lineup, and Bryant’s lawyers said Michael had lied to the police about other things. The youth’s testimony, however, was supported by Michael’s mother, who said she recognized Bryant as someone who had been in the home that day.

Bryant is African American. Michael’s mother is Latina. On cross-examination, his lawyers tried to ask her about something she had blurted out to police while talking about the incident: “F– you n—s.” A Contra Costa County judge, Harlan Grossman, allowed evidence of the f-word but not the n-word, ruling that it had little value as evidence but was so inflammatory that it could get in the way of an objective decision by the jury. He also allowed the mother to testify that she had no racial animosity against Bryant. The jury found him guilty and, with a previous felony on his record, he was sentenced to 21 years in prison.

State courts upheld Bryant’s conviction, and he fared no better this month when his case reached the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

California courts “could reasonably determine that use of the epithet in a moment of anger was of minimal relevance to her identification of Bryant,” the three-judge panel said. “Yet the epithet is so rightly frowned upon by our society that the state courts could reasonably determine that evidence of its use would be so highly offensive and inflammatory that it would cause undue prejudice to the state’s case.”

Bryant’s lawyer, Amitai Schwartz, criticized the ruling and said he would probably appeal it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The case had a race element in it,” he said, and the epithet “really showed her bias.”

The ruling can be viewed here: http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/memoranda/2014/12/01/12-16528.pdf.