Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca10-95-01004/USCOURTS-ca10-95-01004-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Darrell Bailey
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

PUBLISH F I L E D 

UDited States Court of Appeals 

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS Tenth Circuit 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

Plaintiff-Appellee, 

v. 

DARRELL BAILEY, 

Defendant-Appellant. 

TENTH CIRCUIT 

95-1004 

FEB 0 2 1996 

PATRICK FISHER 

Clerk 

On Appeal From The 

United States District Court 

For The District Of Colorado 

(D.C. No. 94-CR-152-1) 

Raymond P. Moore, Assistant Federal Public Defender (Michael G. 

Katz, Federal Public Defender, with him on the briefs), Denver, 

Colorado, for Defendant-Appellant. 

Kyra Jenner, Assistant United States Attorney (Henry L. Solano, 

United States Attorney, with her on the brief), Denver, Colorado, 

for Plaintiff-Appellee. 

Before BALDOCK, SETH, and BRORBY, Circuit Judges. 

SETH, Circuit Judge. 

Appellate Case: 95-1004 Document: 01019276559 Date Filed: 02/02/1996 Page: 1 
Appellant Darrell Lamont Bailey was tried and convicted on 

two counts of assaulting a federal prison employee in violation of 

18 U.S.C. § lll(a). Appellant argues on appeal that the district 

court erred in denying his motion to dismiss the indictment or 

stay his trial because the master jury wheels from which his grand 

and petit juries were drawn were not selected in accordance with 

the procedures mandated by the Jury Selection and Procedure Act, 

28 U.S.C. §§ 1861-1869. Appellant also contends that the district 

court erred in sentencing him to a term of supervised release to 

run consecutively to an existing term of supervised release. 

For substantially the reasons stated in the district court's 

Memorandum and Order of September 7, 1994, United States v. 

Bailey, 862 F. Supp. 277 (D. Colo.), we affirm the district 

court's denial of Appellant's motion to dismiss his indictment or 

stay his trial proceedings. We reverse, however, the district 

court's imposition of consecutive terms of supervised release. 

The Master Jury Wheels 

Appellant argues that, pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1867(d), the 

district court should have stayed or dismissed proceedings against 

him because the court clerk substantially failed to comply with 

the provisions of the Jury Selection Act in selecting the master 

jury wheels from which Appellant's grand and petit juries were 

drawn. To the extent that Appellant's contentions rest on 

statutory interpretations, we review the district court's denial 

of Appellant's motion de novo. Anderson v. Commissioner, 62 F.3d 

1266, 1270 (lOth Cir.). The district court's factual findings, 

however, will not be disturbed unless clearly erroneous. Id. 

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The district court's Memorandum and Order discusses in detail 

the pertinent facts and applicable law supporting its denial of 

Appellant's motion. We outline here only the most salient points. 

One of the goals of the Jury Selection Act is to afford 

federal litigants grand and petit juries that represent random, 

nondiscriminatory cross sections of the community. 28 U.S.C. 

§§ 1861-1862. To fulfill this goal, each district court must 

devise and implement a written plan that, among other things, will 

"ensure that each county, parish, or similar political subdivision 

within the district or division is substantially proportionally 

represented in the master jury wheel for that judicial district, 

division, or combination of divisions." Id. at§ 1863(b) (3). 

Proportionality may be determined either by the number of actual 

voters in the most recent general election or by the number of 

registered voters. Id. 

The federal district court in Colorado has placed into 

operation a jury plan that divides the state into four divisions: 

the Denver division (consisting of 23 counties) , the Grand 

Junction division (14 counties), the Pueblo division (21 

counties), and the Durango division (5 counties). The plan bases 

proportionality on voter registration numbers in accordance with 

§ 1863(b) (3) but, in an effort to obtain a better cross section of 

the community as mandated by§ 1863(b) (2), the clerk draws 

potential jurors from a list that also includes licensed drivers 

who are not also registered voters. 

Appellant does not challenge Colorado's jury plan. Instead, 

Appellant contests the validity of his grand and petit juries 

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Appellate Case: 95-1004 Document: 01019276559 Date Filed: 02/02/1996 Page: 3 
based on the clerk's failure to implement the plan in creating the 

master jury wheels from which his jury panels were selected. The 

government concedes that the clerk erroneously determined the 

proportional representation of eight counties in the district 

based on combined registered voter/licensed driver lists and five 

other counties based on erroneous numbers of unknown origin. 

These errors infect the clerk's calculations for every division, 

resulting in some counties being overrepresented and others being 

underrepresented. 

Appellant argues that the clerk's failure to compile master 

wheels in accordance with the Jury Selection Act dictated the 

dismissal of his indictment or a stay of the trial proceedings 

against him. Once a court determines that there has been "a 

substantial failure to comply with the provisions of [the Jury 

Selection Act] in selecting the grand [or petit] jury," the court 

must stay the proceedings pending the proper selection of a grand 

or petit jury or dismiss the indictment, whichever is appropriate. 

28 u.s.c. § 1867(d). The district court denied Appellant's 

motion, concluding that the clerk's errors, while not in 

conformity with Colorado's jury plan or the Act, did not rise to 

the level of a "substantial failure to comply with the provisions 

[of the Act]." 

We agree with Appellant that Congress considered proportional 

representation based on voter registration to be a "fundamental" 

and "important" procedural requirement by the Jury Selection Act. 

See H.R. Rep. No. 1076, 90th Cong., 2d Sess. (1968), reprinted in 

1968 U.S.C.C.A.N. 1792, 1793 & 1799. This does not mean, however, 

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Appellate Case: 95-1004 Document: 01019276559 Date Filed: 02/02/1996 Page: 4 
that every error or deviation in calculating proportionality 

constitutes "a substantial failure to comply" with the provisions 

of the Act. If a technical or inadvertent deviation from the 

mandated procedure has no significant effect on the makeup of the 

resulting master jury wheel, a clerk's reliance on erroneous voter 

registration figures cannot be considered a "substantial failure 

to comply." As the Eleventh Circuit stated in United States v. 

Gregory, 730 F.2d 692, 699 (11th Cir.): 

"Mere 'technical' deviations from the Act or 

even a number of them are insufficient [to 

constitute a substantial failure] if they do 

not frustrate the obtaining of jury lists that 

represent a cross section of the relevant 

community and do not result in impermissible 

forms of discrimination and arbitrariness." 

See also United States v. Barnette, 800 F.2d 1558, 1567 (11th 

Cir.); United States v. LaChance, 788 F.2d 856, 870 (2d Cir.); 

United States v. Schmidt, 711 F.2d 595, 600 (5th Cir.); 

United States v. Bearden, 659 F.2d 590, 600-01 (5th Cir.). 

The effect of the clerk's errors on Appellant's grand jury 

pool, which was compiled based on the proportional representation 

of each of the four Colorado divisions, was minuscule. Of 300 

potential jurors for the entire district, only one juror was 

misplaced among divisions. As a result, the Denver division was 

represented by 218 positions instead of 217, and the Pueblo 

division was represented by 54 positions instead of 55. Bailey, 

862 F. Supp. at 281-82. The Durango and Grand Junction divisions 

were unaffected. Uncontroverted evidence submitted by the 

government at the hearing on Appellant's motion indicates that 

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Appellate Case: 95-1004 Document: 01019276559 Date Filed: 02/02/1996 Page: 5 
there was absolutely no impact on the racial composition of the 

grand jury pool. 

The clerk's errors had a somewhat more pronounced but still 

not significant effect on Appellant's petit jury pool. The master 

jury wheel for Appellant's petit jury was compiled based on 

proportional representation of the 23 counties within the Denver 

division. In that division, almost every county was 

misrepresented to some extent as a result of the clerk's errors. 

The magnitude of the deviations is small, however, exceeding one 

percent in only a single county, and that county deviated from its 

actual proportional representation by just over three percent. 

Bailey, 862 F. Supp. at 284-85. In addition, the clerk's figures 

threw off minority group representation in the petit jury pool by 

less than one percent. Id. at 283. 

None of the effects on the master jury wheels from which 

Appellant's grand and petit juries were drawn is of a magnitude to 

warrant staying or dismissing any of Appellant's judicial 

proceedings. The clerk's use of the erroneous numbers, which the 

clerk apparently believed were pure voter registration numbers, 

did not significantly deviate from the Jury Selection Act's 

procedures or purposes. Each county and division remained 

"substantially proportionally represented" in both the grand and 

petit master jury wheels as required by 28 U.S.C. § 1863(b) (3). 

Furthermore, Appellant has failed to show that the clerk's errors 

excluded a cognizable group or segment of the community from the 

juror pools in a way or to an extent that would frustrate the 

Act's underlying purpose of affording litigants grand and petit 

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Appellate Case: 95-1004 Document: 01019276559 Date Filed: 02/02/1996 Page: 6 
juries that represent random, nondiscriminatory cross sections of 

the community. As we stated in United States v. Test, 550 F.2d 

577, 582 n.4 (lOth Cir.) (quotations and internal quotation marks 

omitted) : 

"Mere geographical imbalance [as measured by a 

division's over representation in a master 

jury wheel] , absent evidence that an 

identifiable and cognizable segment of the 

community has been systematically excluded or 

under represented by reason of such imbalance, 

does not violate the statutory and 

constitutional requirement that the jury panel 

represent a fair cross section of the 

community." 

We therefore conclude that the clerk's errors in determining 

the number of registered voters for several counties in the 

Colorado district did not amount to a substantial failure to 

comply with the provisions of the Jury Selection Act. Neither the 

nature nor the results of her errors significantly defeated any 

provision of the Act. Thus, we affirm the district court's denial 

of Appellant's motion to dismiss his indictment or stay the trial 

proceedings against him. 

Consecutive Terms of Supervised Release 

In addition to a term of imprisonment, the district court 

sentenced Appellant to a three-year term of supervised release to 

run consecutively to a prior term of supervised release imposed by 

a different court for another offense. Because Appellant's 

challenge to this sentencing action is based on a question of law, 

we review the district court's imposition of consecutive terms of 

supervised release de novo. 

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Where a federal statute mandates that separate terms of 

supervised release run consecutively, we have held that a trial 

court properly may stack consecutive terms of supervised release 

for multiple convictions. United States v. Maxwell, 966 F.2d 545 

(lOth Cir.). However, where there is no such independent 

statutory mandate as is the case here, 18 U.S.C. § 3624(e) governs 

the relationship of multiple terms of supervised release: 

"The term of supervised release commences on 

the day the person is released from 

imprisonment and runs concurrently with any 

Federal, State, or local term of probation or 

supervised release or parole for another 

offense to which the person is subject II 

(Emphasis added.) The meaning of this provision clearly dictates 

that the district court erred in sentencing Appellant to 

consecutive terms of supervised release for separate offenses. 

See United States v. Gullickson, 982 F.2d 1231, 1236 (8th Cir): 

"[The supervised release provision of§ 3624] 

unambiguously states that terms of supervised 

release on multiple convictions are to run 

concurrently. We are of course bound to 

follow the plain language of the statute." 

Because the district court impermissibly imposed consecutive terms 

of supervised release, we reverse the district court on this 

issue. 

For the foregoing reasons, we AFFIRM in part, REVERSE in 

part, and REMAND so that the district court may adjust Appellant's 

sentence in a manner consistent with this opinion. 

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