Case Title: State v. Pelican

Citation: 

Docket Number: 

State: vermont

Court: Vermont Supreme Court

Date: 1990-03-01T00:00:00Z

Document:
NOTICE:  This opinion is subject to motions for reargument under V.R.A.P. 40
as well as formal revision before publication in the Vermont Reports.
Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of Decisions, Vermont Supreme
Court, 111 State Street, Montpelier, Vermont 05602 of any errors in order
that corrections may be made before this opinion goes to press.


                                No. 89-260


State of Vermont                             Supreme Court

     v.                                      On Appeal from
                                             District Court of Vermont,
Terrance L. Pelican                          Unit No. 2, Franklin Circuit

                                             March Term, 1990


George T. Costes, J.

Howard E. Van Benthuyson, Franklin County State's Attorney, and Jo-Ann
   Gross, Deputy State's Attorney, St. Albans, for plaintiff-appellee

Walter M. Morris, Jr., Defender General, and William A. Nelson, Appellate
   Defender, Montpelier, for defendant-appellant


PRESENT:  Allen, C.J., Peck, Gibson, Dooley and Morse, JJ.


     DOOLEY, J.   This is an interlocutory appeal, pursuant to V.R.A.P.
5(b), from an order of the district court denying defendant's motion to
strike the jury panel.  We affirm.
                                    I.
     Defendant is charged with second degree murder.  On March 24, 1989,
defendant filed a pretrial motion to strike the jury panel, arguing that
the jury selection procedures in Franklin County result in jury venires
which substantially misrepresent the community in terms of age, occupation
and economic status in violation of his constitutional and statutory rights.
Three witnesses testified at the evidentiary hearing on the motion.  The
first witness, the County Clerk of the Franklin Superior Court and member of
the Franklin County Jury Commission, described the jury selection process in
Franklin County.  The second witness was qualified as an expert in the field
of data analysis.  He compared certain characteristics of a group of 320
potential jurors with the characteristics of the Franklin County population
as a whole.  The final witness was qualified as an expert in the field of
sociology, and he testified to the social significance of this comparison.
     Based upon the testimony of these three witnesses, the court made the
following findings.  The Franklin County Jury Commission (Commission) com-
poses a "Master List" of 1500 names of potential jurors who are randomly
drawn from the voter registration lists of towns within the county and a
list of residents over eighteen years old with a driver's license.  The
Master List provides the names of potential jury panels and is updated every
two years.  One thousand names are selected from the voter list (which
contains approximately 22,000 names), and the remaining five hundred are
selected from the license list (which contains approximately 21,000 names).
The names of potential jurors for the Master List were selected in
accordance with the Rules of the Court Administrator entitled Rules
Governing Qualification, List, Selection and Summoning of All Jurors
(hereinafter, Rules).  Once the Master List of 1500 names was complete, the
Commission assigned a number to each name.  Tags were marked with these
numbers and deposited in a rotating canister called a "wheel."  When the
Franklin District Court requested jurors, the Commission would draw at
random 200 to 250 tags from the wheel in order to extract a pool of 150
qualified jurors.  Once the tags were pulled and matched with the
corresponding names, those people were sent jury questionnaires.  In
response to its requests, the Franklin District Court Clerk received a list
of 142 qualified jurors in July of 1988 and a list of 147 qualified jurors
in January of 1989.  These two pools were the source from which defendant's
jury panel was to be drawn.
     Defendant's data-analysis expert examined 320 jury questionnaires to
determine the composition of the jury pool.  He analyzed the pool and the
population of Franklin County with respect to age, gender, marital status,
occupational status and educational attainment.  No significant statistical
disparities were found with respect to gender, marital status, education and
occupation.  Only 240 questionnaires contained information relating to the
age of the potential juror, and they revealed the following.  In the age
group of 18-to-20-year-olds, .5% (one juror was age 20) of the jury pool
was in that group as compared to an estimated 7% of the community in that
group.  In the age group of 18-to-24-year-olds, there were 6.2% in the pool
and an estimated 16% of that age group in the community.  Finally, in the
age group of 45 to 54, 24.2% of the jury pool were in that age group as
compared to 14.9% in the community.
     Based on the testimony, the trial court found that persons aged 18 to
24 are a distinctive group because "their attitudes are different from those
in other age groups and they behave differently than other age groups in the
areas of fertility, crime and delinquency."  The court also found that the
age group of 18-to-20-year-olds is a distinctive age group because "their
attitudes are different from other age groups in part as a result of laws
which apply to their age group and not others."  The court found, however,
that the 45-to-54-year-old age group was not a sociologically distinct
category of persons.
     The court then went on to examine the specific claim with respect to
the groups.  It found that while voter registration lists significantly
underrepresent young people, adding the driver's license list as a source
of prospective jurors increases the chance of young people being selected
to serve.  The court found no evidence that any person qualified to vote was
prevented or discouraged from registering to vote in Franklin County.  Nor
was there any evidence that any qualified person was prevented or discour-
aged from receiving a driver's license.  Nevertheless, the court found that
because one must be at least eighteen years old to be eligible to be placed
on the Master List, the selection process systematically excluded people who
are eighteen and nineteen years of age because the Master List was updated
only every two years.
     Based upon these findings, the court concluded that defendant failed to
meet his burden of proof to establish a violation of his Sixth Amendment
right to a jury drawn from a fair cross section of the community.  The court
concluded that for either 18-to-20-year-olds or 18-to-24-year-olds, defend-
ant failed to establish that members of the group were not fairly and
reasonably represented in the jury pool.  The court reached this conclusion
based on the absolute disparity between the incidence of members of the
group in the community and the incidence in the pool.  In addition, the
court concluded that defendant did not show that there is a difference
between his Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury and his right under
the Vermont Constitution to a fair and democratic jury.  The court also held
that defendant failed to establish a violation of his right to equal
protection under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution
and Chapter I, Article 7 of the Vermont Constitution, because he did not
prove that there was substantial under- or overrepresentation or that any
of the groups were intentionally or purposefully discriminated against.
Finally, the court concluded that defendant's statutory claims were without
merit because he failed to demonstrate that the Master List was
unrepresentative of the community.  On May 16, 1989, the court granted
defendant's motion for an interlocutory appeal under V.R.A.P. 5(b).
     Defendant's appeal is limited to the issue of age bias in the jury
selection process.  He argues that his showing of a substantial under-
representation of young people on Franklin County jury venires made out a
prima facie violation of his right to a representative jury as guaranteed
by the Vermont Constitution, by Vermont's jury selection statutes, and by
the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Federal Constitution.
                                    II.
     Before we address defendant's arguments, we must be satisfied that this
is a proper case for interlocutory review.  Under Appellate Rule 5(b)(1),
the trial judge may permit an interlocutory appeal if the defendant
establishes three elements: "(1) the ruling to be appealed must involve a
controlling question of law; (2) there must be a substantial ground for
difference of opinion on that question of law; and (3) an immediate appeal
must materially advance the termination of the litigation."  State v. Wheel,
148 Vt. 439, 440,