Case ID: ohio-st_20/html/0233-01.html
Source: Caselaw Access Project
Author: {"author": "By the Court:", "license": "Public Domain", "url": "https://static.case.law/"}
Date Created: 2024-08-24T03:29:51.129683

Emanuel Schufflin v. The State of Ohio.
    On the impanelling of a jury for the trial of a person indicted for murder in the first degree, he claimed the right to reserve his peremptory challenges until a full panel of twelve, not liable to successful challenge for cause, should be selected. The court refused this, and required both parties to make their peremptory challenges after having first exhausted their challenges for cause, to each juror as called, and, upon failure of the parties to make any valid challenge, ordered the juror, so called, at once to be sworn as such. Held: That, in thus selecting the jury, there was no error to the injury of the defendant.
    Motion for the allowance of a writ of error to the court of common pleas of Scioto county.
    Sehufflin was tried upon an indictment fpr murder in the first degree, and convicted of manslaughter. On the impanelling of the jury he claimed the right to reserve his peremptory challenges until a full panel of twelve, not liable to successful challenge for cause, should be selected. But the court refused this, and required both parties to make their peremptory challenges after having first - exhausted their challenges for cause, to each juror as called, and, upon failure of the parties to make any valid challenge, caused the juryman so called at once to be sworn as such. To this ruling the defendant below excepted, and he now assigns it for error.
    
      O. F. Moore and J. J. Harper, for the motion, cited Hooker v. The State, 4 Ohio St. 348, and argued that the court below erred in its ruling as to the mode of selecting the jury; and to the prejudice of the accused, for the reason that it deprived him of exercising his right of peremptory challenge by comparison of one juror with another; that he could not compare and choose, until he had before him those from whom the choice was to be made.
    
      F. B. Pond, attorney-general, and Henry F. Jones, prosecuting attorney, contra.
    
   By the Court:

The mode of impanelling a jury in capital cases adopted by the court below has long been in practice in many counties of the State, and we see no error in it to the injury of the defendant. The law guarantees to him the rights to challenge for cause, and to make twenty-three peremptory challenges, but it leaves wholly to the discretion of the court the means and manner of administering that right. We are not prepared to say that the method adopted in this case was not reasonable, and calculated to carry out substantially and fairly the provisions of the law.

Motion overruled.