Opinion ID: 2399306
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Claim of tainted jury selection

Text: Appellant, who is an African-American, claims that the trial court erred in denying his challenge to the array of prospective jurors on the ground that only two out of 161 were of African-American descent. Thus, he contends that it did not reflect a fair cross section of the community, as required under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. Further, he argues that Berks County's use of a driver's license list systematically excluded African-Americans from the jury pool. In support of his argument, Johnson invokes statistics that reveal that 9.7% of the population of the City of Reading is comprised of persons of African-American descent. In response to Johnson's objection at trial, the Commonwealth presented the testimony from the jury supervisor for Berks County, who indicated that a computer had randomly selected the panel from a list of residents having driver's licenses provided by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Transportation, which contained approximately 250,000 names. The Commonwealth notes that Appellant does not have the right to demand that specific numbers of minorities sit on the jury panel which judges him. See Commonwealth v. Jones, 452 Pa. 299, 304 A.2d 684 (1973); Commonwealth v. Craver, 547 Pa. 17, 27-28, 688 A.2d 691, 696 (1997) (`Defendants are not entitled to a jury of any particular composition, but the jury wheels, pools of names, panels, or venires from which juries are drawn must not systematically exclude distinctive groups in the community and thereby fail to be reasonably representative thereof.' (quoting Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 538, 95 S.Ct. 692, 701, 42 L.Ed.2d 690 (1975) (emphasis in original))). To establish a prima facie violation of the requirement that a jury array fairly represent the community, Johnson must show that: (1) the group allegedly excluded is a distinctive group in the community; (2) the representation of this group in venires from which juries are selected is not fair and reasonable in relation to the number of such people in the community; and (3) this underrepresentation is due to systematic exclusion of the group in the jury selection process. Systematic means caused by or inherent in the system by which juries were selected. Craver, 547 Pa. at 28, 688 A.2d at 696 (citing Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357, 364, 366-67, 99 S.Ct. 664, 668-70, 58 L.Ed.2d 579 (1979)). Proof is required of an actual discriminatory practice in the jury selection process, not merely under-representation of one particular group. See id. at 27-28, 688 A.2d at 696. The defendant bears the initial burden of presenting prima facie evidence of discrimination in the jury selection process. See Jones, 452 Pa. at 312, 304 A.2d at 692. This Court has rejected various criminal defendant's attacks, on the basis that African-Americans were underrepresented, to the racial composition of a jury panel drawn from voter registration lists. See Commonwealth v. Bridges, 563 Pa. 1, 18, 757 A.2d 859, 868 (2000); Commonwealth v. Henry, 524 Pa. 135, 144, 569 A.2d 929, 933 (1990). More recently, the reasoning and holdings of those cases have been extended to approve the usage of driver's license lists for purposes of jury selection. See Commonwealth v. Johnson, 572 Pa. 283, 305, 815 A.2d 563, 575 (2002) (plurality) (Absent some showing that driver's license selection procedures are inherently biased, [the defendant] has failed to distinguish jury pool lists derived from voter registration records from those derived from driver's license registration lists); [12] accord Commonwealth v. Cameron, 445 Pa.Super. 165, 175-76, 664 A.2d 1364, 1369 (1995). Here, while Johnson presented evidence to suggest that African-Americans were underrepresented, he has not offered evidence or argument revealing systematic exclusion. Therefore, he has failed to establish a constitutional violation.