Source: https://jurylaw.typepad.com/deliberations/death_penalty/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 16:07:31+00:00

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The Supreme Court is hearing argument today on Snyder v. Louisiana, another case where a prosecutor struck all the black jurors in a death penalty trial. Batson v. Kentucky says the prosecutor needed racially neutral reasons for rejecting these jurors, and the Court will decide whether the purported reasons are good enough, especially after the prosecutor invoked the O.J. Simpson case in closing argument after having promised he would not do so.
There's a larger question looming, though: whether peremptory strikes will survive at all. "I believe it necessary to reconsider Batson's test and the peremptory challenge system as a whole," said Justice Breyer in his 2005 Miller-El v. Dretke concurrence. In Rice v. Collins in January 2006 he concurred again, repeating that sentence, this time joined by Justice Souter. It seems unlikely that three more justices have come to this view in the almost-two years since Rice, but the issue isn't going away.
"The most famous murder case, and all of you have heard about it"
After Snyder had been charged with murder, the prosecutor, before the trial began, made a number of public comments comparing the case to the O.J. Simpson case, in which the former pro athlete was charged with murdering his wife and a friend of hers; Simpson was acquitted. Snyder’s defense lawyer filed a motion to bar such comparisons in future comments by the prosecutor, and was turned down, but the prosecutor said he would not mention the Simpson case during the trial itself – a vow he reportedly broke.
In the jury selection process, there were nine blacks in a pool of 85 eligible potential jurors. The state removed four for stated causes, and the remaining five by peremptory challenge – with the defense objecting to some of those strikes on Batson grounds. One of the results: an all-white jury.
The O.J. Simpson case was not mentioned by the prosecutor during the guilt phase. In closing argument during the death-sentencing phase, the prosecutor said this case “made me think of something. Made me think of another case, the most famous murder case in the last, in probably recorded history, that all of you are aware of... " At that point, the defense objected, unsuccessfully. The prosecutor went on: “The most famous murder case, and all of you have heard about it, happened in California, very, very, very similar to this case. The perpetrator in that case claimed that he was going to kill himself as he drove in a Ford Bronco and kept the police off of him, and you know what, he got away with it.” The jury returned with a sentence of death.
[T]he use of race- and gender-based stereotypes in the jury-selection process seems better organized and more systematized than ever before. See, e.g., Post, A Loaded Box of Stereotypes: Despite 'Batson,' Race, Gender Play Big Roles in Jury Selection., Nat. L. J., Apr. 25, 2005, pp. 1, 18 (discussing common reliance on race and gender in jury selection). For example, one jury-selection guide counsels attorneys to perform a "demographic analysis" that assigns numerical points to characteristics such as age, occupation, and marital status--in addition to race as well as gender. See V. Starr & A. McCormick, Jury Selection 193-200 (3d ed. 2001). Thus, in a hypothetical dispute between a white landlord and an African-American tenant, the authors suggest awarding two points to an African-American venire member while subtracting one point from her white counterpart. Id., at 197-199.
"Only weakly and inconsistently related"
"The 'scientific' use of peremptory challenges," Justice Breyer concluded, "may also contribute to public cynicism about the fairness of the jury system and its role in American government."
It may and often does, and the sad part is that broad demographic stereotyping of jurors is almost always factually mistaken. Despite half a century of assiduous research into juror demographics, "juror demographic characteristics have been only weakly and inconsistently related to juror verdict preferences," say Dennis Devine and the other authors of "Jury Decision Making: 45 Years of Empirical Research on Deliberating Groups," a comprehensive literature review in the March 2000 issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. The sole exception is the simple fact at issue in Batson and Snyder: "jury demographic factors interact with defendant characteristics to produce a bias in favor of defendants who are similar to the jury in some salient respect." Jurors' experiences and attitudes are highly relevant to trial lawyers, but tossing jurors into demographic categories alone sheds little light on those.
Among the best resources on Snyder v. Louisiana are Scotuswiki, an amazing new resource; the amicus brief for the Constitution Project at Wilmer Hale's web site; the ABA's preview; the Los Angeles Times article pointed to in Sentencing Law and Policy Blog; yesterday's USA Today article; and How Appealing's link to the Christian Science Monitor. More certainly will be said.
Prior discussion on the peremptory strike on this blog is, or is linked to, here.
ScotusBlog recap of oral arguments.
Transcript of oral arguments, also via ScotusBlog.
If your answer to the first question is yes, don’t raise your hand right away, but listen very carefully to the second question. If your answer to that question is yes, you must raise your hand and come up and talk to the Court about the issue. Okay?
Now, here is the first question. And, again, you don’t need to raise your hand. Listen carefully. This is a question about you personally, you personally as well as any close family member or close personal friend. Is there anyone in that group, either you personally, close family member or close personal friend, who is either presently or previously employed by any law enforcement agency?
Good question. But of course no one is raising a hand yet.
Now, if the answer to that is yes, listen very carefully to this question. As a result of that experience that either you had personally or are having right now as an employee, as a result of that experience or as a result of the experience of a close family member or a close friend, . . . do you believe that you, that you personally would be unable to be fair and impartial to both sides if selected as a juror in this case?
Do you mean . . .
Wait a minute. One of those people could be a career police officer and the lawyers would never know it? That's right -- and once the compound voir dire questions were finished, the lawyers also had to rely on jurors' assessment of their own bias to learn whether prospective jurors knew the other jurors; were involved in criminal defense work; were lawyers; had served as grand jurors; or had served as jurors in a criminal case before.
“[W]hether a juror can render a verdict based solely on evidence adduced in the courtroom should not be adjudged on that juror’s own assessment of self-righteousness without something more.” And as West recognizes, such self-evaluation is particularly troublesome when jurors are asked about the potential bias caused by their employment history. Even the most scrupulous juror may not recognize that “lingering loyalty [to a past employer], friendship of persons still employed there, or knowledge of agency procedures” may color his or her judgment.
(1) whether they would automatically vote for the death penalty, (2) whether they would automatically vote for life without probation or parole, and (3) whether they would be able to follow the court’s instructions and consider both the imposition of the death penalty or the imposition of life without probation or parole.
Sixteen venirepersons responded that they would both automatically impose the death penalty and would automatically impose life imprisonment if they convicted the defendant of first-degree murder. Despite this contradiction, the court refused to ask additional death qualification questions or allow counsel to do so.
Not pretty, but this is habeas. "Were we reviewing this case on direct appeal, we might have come to a different conclusion," the Eighth Circuit said. But it held that the Missouri Supreme Court wasn't "objectively unreasonable" -- the federal habeas standard -- in upholding the conviction. The case is one of the first to cite the Supreme Court's latest death-penalty-juror case, Uttecht v. Brown, stressing the importance of the trial court's ability to observe jurors first-hand.
Does your jury have to be unanimous? It sounds like an simple question if you know what kind of case it is, in what court. But it isn't simple. A University of Michigan scholar and the New Jersey Supreme Court are among the latest to tackle what unanimity really means.
Is it A, B, or C?
[I]t often arises under statutes that make it an offense to commit one or another of various acts, say, acts A, B, and/or C, thereby leading to evidence at trial that a defendant committed one act or another or even all of them. Depending upon how jurors assess the evidence, it can happen that one-third of the jurors find that the defendant committed act A and not either B or C, that one-third finds that he committed act B and not either A or C, and that one-third finds that he committed act C and not either A or B. The constitutional question is whether the Fifth, Sixth and/or Fourteenth Amendments permit a defendant to be found guilty when, although every juror agrees that he used one of the various means, and although every juror may have a view as to which means he used, a majority of jurors do not agree upon which means it was.
each juror is convinced that, if his counterpart is correct in denying that the defendant employed the means that the juror believed the defendant used, then the defendant did not commit the offense at all.
The paper is elegantly written and full of fact scenarios with names like "Rare Map" and "John Hancock's Watch" that make the logic much easier to follow and make the whole thing read like a game of "Clue."
Unanimity in reverse: how many jurors must agree on mitigating factors?
Yesterday in a case called State v. Jimenez, the New Jersey Supreme Court tackled the flip side of this problem: not how the jurors must agree to convict a defendant, but how they must agree not to sentence him to death.
After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that states could not execute the mentally retarded, state courts had to figure out how to change their rules to make it so. In an earlier appeal of Mr. Jimenez's case, New Jersey held that mental retardation was something the defendant had to prove, not something the prosecution had to disprove.
But prove to how many jurors' satisfaction? The earlier case didn't say, so the case went up again. The answer, said the court yesterday, flows from the U.S. Supreme Court's Mills v. Maryland holding that jurors don't have to agree on mitigating factors in death cases. (If they did, you could end up with jurors who all agreed the defendant should not die, but he would die anyway because they disagreed on why he shouldn't.) Mental retardation is a "conclusive mitigating factor," the New Jersey court said, meaning it's enough by itself to bar execution. So if even one juror is satisfied the defendant is mentally retarded, that's enough to save his life.
Organizational note: I'm starting a "death penalty" category for past and future posts on that topic. I hope it's helpful.
I know you're out there. I see your searches.
They come in steadily all week, then surge on the weekend. "Voir dire questions murder case." "Illinois personal injury voir dire." "Voir dire questions in a fraud trial." "Sexual abuse case voir dire." "Jury voir dire in a civil rights case." Sometimes you spell it "voire dire," but you still end up here.
Maybe you're working ahead, because you know that thinking early about the jury makes you think about the case in new ways. Or maybe your trial is Monday morning; your jury instructions and motions in limine and exhibits are in, and you're turning to voir dire because you finally can. You may already have an outline and are looking for a checklist to see what you missed, or you may be starting from scratch.
Whereever you are in the project, you're not looking for a bunch of musing, occasionally amusing essays that may or may not add up to something helpful. You're looking for one list, all in one place, something you can use.
For you, voir dire question searcher, Deliberations announces its new Sample Juror Questionnaires library. (There's a link on the sidebar.) On this page is a growing collection of jury questionnaires, either given or proposed, from actual cases. Use them to brainstorm or cross-check your own voir dire questions; as source material in asking your judge to allow a jury questionnaire; or just as a way to think about how an individual juror's background and experiences might shape the way she hears your case.
Please feel free to submit questionnaires for this page, whether approved by the court or merely proposed, and ask your friends to do the same. If you send one, I'll credit you as author or contributor, and link to your website if you'd like. You can E-mail submissions to me at jov15@pitt.edu; please tell me a little about the case as well, so I can describe it helpfully. Likewise if you're the author of something I've already posted and would like credit, let me know.

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