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Parties Involved:
Darrie Dewayne Dees
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

[DO NOT PUBLISH]

IN THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE ELEVENTH CIRCUIT

________________________

No. 14-11977

Non-Argument Calendar

________________________

D.C. Docket No. 2:12-cr-00201-CG-B-1

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

 Plaintiff-Appellee,

 versus

DARRIE DEWAYNE DEES, 

a.k.a. Dee-Bo, 

 Defendant-Appellant.

________________________

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Southern District of Alabama

________________________

(February 26, 2015)

Before HULL, WILSON and ROSENBAUM, Circuit Judges.

PER CURIAM: 

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Darrie Dewayne Dees appeals his conviction for being a felon in possession 

of a firearm. He argues that the district court abused its discretion by denying his 

motion, under Rule 18 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, to hold his trial 

in Selma, Alabama, instead of Mobile, because it prevented him from being tried 

by a jury comprised of jurors who live near Selma and are more comparable to him 

in racial and socioeconomic terms. He also argues that the court violated the Fifth 

and Sixth Amendments and the Jury Selection and Service Act (JSSA), 28 U.S.C. 

§§ 1861 et seq., by seating a jury drawn from the district-at-large instead of solely 

from the Northern Division of the Southern District of Alabama. We will address 

each argument in turn.

I. Rule 18

A district court has discretion to fix the place of a trial in any division within 

the district, and we review the district court’s decision only for abuse of discretion. 

United States v. Betancourt, 734 F.2d 750, 755–56 (11th Cir. 1984).

Rule 18 states:

Unless a statute or these rules permit otherwise, the government must 

prosecute an offense in a district where the offense was committed. 

The court must set the place of trial within the district with due regard 

for the convenience of the defendant, any victim, and the witnesses, 

and the prompt administration of justice. 

Fed. R. Crim. P. 18 (emphasis added).

Rule 18 allows a court to consider the prompt administration of justice

in fixing the place of trial, and matters of security clearly fall within 

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that consideration. In addition, the prompt administration of justice 

includes more than the case at bar; the phrase includes the state of the 

court’s docket generally. The court must balance not only the effect 

the location of the trial will have upon the defendants and their 

witnesses, but it must weigh the impact the trial location will have on 

the timely disposition of the instant case and other cases.

United States v. Merrill, 513 F.3d 1293, 1304 (11th Cir. 2008) (citations and 

internal quotation marks omitted).

The district court did not abuse its discretion by denying Dee’s motion to fix

the trial in Selma. The court considered Dees’s convenience and that of the 

witnesses in holding trial in Selma but found the convenience interests outweighed 

by security and safety concerns in both Selma and Mobile, as well as issues 

concerning the prompt administration of justice in Mobile. The district court found 

that a trial in Selma would require temporarily transferring court security officers 

from Mobile to Selma. This, in turn, would negatively impact the security of the 

Mobile courthouse and would force that court to put all trials and hearings on hold 

while the government tried Dees in Selma. See id. Moreover, structural issues, 

including withering ceiling tiles and asbestos in the Selma courthouse, weighed 

against holding trial there.

As such, the court considered all of the Rule 18 factors and found that they 

favored leaving the trial in Mobile. Dees may disagree with the weight accorded to 

some of the factors the district court considered, but that is not grounds for finding 

an abuse of discretion. See Waters v. Int’l Precious Metals Corp., 190 F.3d 1291, 

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1293 (11th Cir. 1999) (noting that disagreement with the district court does not 

support finding an abuse of discretion). Accordingly, we affirm in this respect. 

II. Fifth and Sixth Amendments and the JSSA

We review de novo constitutional challenges to jury selection processes. 

United States v. Grisham, 63 F.3d 1074, 1077 (11th Cir. 1995). We also review de 

novo claims under the JSSA. United States v. Carmichael, 560 F.3d 1270, 1277–

79 (11th Cir. 2009).

A. Fifth Amendment

To establish a Fifth Amendment equal protection violation in the jury 

selection context, a defendant must show “(1) that he or she is a member of a group 

capable of being singled out for discriminatory treatment, (2) that members of this 

group were substantially underrepresented on the venire, and (3) that the venire 

was selected under a practice providing an opportunity for discrimination.” 

Cunningham v. Zant, 928 F.2d 1006, 1013 (11th Cir. 1991). Dees did not present 

any data or argument to support the second element of his equal protection 

argument. Rather, he only asserts that the Northern Division has a higher 

proportion of African-Americans living within its area. It does not follow that 

African-Americans were underrepresented on the venire. Therefore, he failed to 

establish a prima facie case of a Fifth Amendment violation. See id.

B. Sixth Amendment

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The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees a speedy 

and public trial in the state and district “where the crime was committed, but there 

is no constitutional right to trial within a division.” Betancourt, 734 F.2d at 756 

(citing United States v. Anderson, 328 U.S. 699, 704, 705, 66 S. Ct. 1213, 1216, 

1217 (1946)). The Supreme Court has explained that this requires “the selection of 

a petit jury from a representative cross section of the community.” Taylor v. 

Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 528, 95 S. Ct. 692, 697 (1975). The judicial district of 

the United States Courts satisfies the “district” and “community” requirements. 

See Grisham, 63 F.3d at 1079–80 (rejecting defendant’s argument that the Sixth 

Amendment requires a venire from the division where the crime occurred). 

To establish a prima facie violation of this constitutional requirement, the 

defendant must demonstrate: 

(1) that the group alleged to be excluded is a “distinctive” group in the 

community; 

(2) that the representation of this group in venires from which juries 

are selected is not fair and reasonable in relation to the number of 

such persons in the community; and 

(3) that this underrepresentation is due to systematic exclusion of the 

group in the jury-selection process. 

Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357, 364, 99 S. Ct. 664, 668 (1978). Failure to 

establish any one of these elements results in the failure of the entire Sixth 

Amendment claim. United States v. Pepe, 747 F.2d 632, 649 (11th Cir. 1984). To 

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determine whether jury representation is fair and reasonable, we will only look to 

the “absolute disparity produced by the selection process,” which, in such cases, 

means there must be more than a ten percentage point disparity between the 

percentage of the group in the population and the percent of the group in the jury 

pool. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). The community to which the venires 

are compared is the district, not the division. See Grisham, 63 F.3d at 1079–80. 

Dees did not present below to the district court nor does he provide on appeal any 

data that would establish the second criterion for a prima facie violation of the 

Sixth Amendment fair cross-section requirement. See Pepe, 747 F.2d at 649.

C. JSSA

The JSSA provides that “all litigants in Federal courts entitled to trial by jury 

shall have the right to grand and petit juries selected at random from a fair cross 

section of the community in the district or division wherein the court convenes.” 

28 U.S.C. § 1861. For a violation of the JSSA to be substantial, and thus provide 

relief, it must frustrate one of the core principles underlying the statute, such as the 

fair cross-section principle. Carmichael, 560 F.3d at 1277. The standard for 

assessing a JSSA fair cross-section violation is the same as that used to determine a 

fair cross-section violation under the Sixth Amendment. United States v. 

Rodriguez, 776 F.2d 1509, 1510 n.1 (11th Cir. 1985). Therefore, because his Sixth 

Amendment claim fails, his JSSA claim also fails.

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AFFIRMED.

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