Opinion ID: 1036479
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 21

Heading: batson analysis in lee’s case

Text: In this appeal, Lee focuses on three things as demonstrating that the state appellate court’s decision was an unreasonable application of Batson: (1) the State’s striking pattern; (2) the district attorney’s office’s alleged racial 110 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 111 of 128 discrimination history in jury selections; and (3) the State’s strike reasons for venire members David Gutridge and Demond Martin. Our careful review of the state court record and the state appellate court’s decision leads us to conclude that the state appellate court did not unreasonably apply Batson within the meaning of § 2254(d)(1).35 We address each of Lee’s arguments in turn.
The State used all of its 21 peremptory strikes and 17 of its 18 cause strikes on black venire members. The State’s striking pattern is troubling, although not alone dispositive of Batson’s third step. Rather, in the statistical analysis courts must consider the statistics in the context of other factors in a case, such as: the racial composition of the venire from which the jurors were struck, the racial composition of the ultimate jury, the substance of the voir dire answers of jurors struck by the State, and any other evidence in the record of a particular case. Indeed, “the number of persons struck takes on meaning only when coupled with other information such as the racial composition of the venire, the race of others struck, or the voir dire answers of those who were struck compared to the answers of those who were not struck.” 35 The State does not claim that the state appellate court procedurally barred any aspect of Lee’s Batson claim. But the State does contend that certain arguments Lee has made in the federal courts were not raised in the state courts and cannot be made here. We disagree and conclude that Lee adequately raised in the state appellate court the claims he made in the district court and now here. 111 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 112 of 128 See United States v. Ochoa-Vasquez, 428 F.3d 1015, 1044 (11th Cir. 2005) (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Cochran v. Herring, 43 F.3d 1404, 1412 (11th Cir. 1995) (stating that “statistical evidence is merely one factor which the court examines, and it is not necessarily dispositive” in evaluating whether a Batson violation has occurred). Here, as to the voir dire answers, the state appellate court examined them and determined that the prosecutor’s strike reasons were all race-neutral. The state appellate court compared the answers of the struck venire members to the answers of seated jurors whom Lee claimed on direct appeal were similarly situated and concluded that there was no disparate treatment. Lee I, 898 So. 2d at 815–17. There is nothing in the substance of the voir dire itself that evinces discriminatory intent. The racial composition of the venire and the selected jury should also be considered. Before peremptory strikes began, 32 of the 53 remaining venire members were black or 60.3% of the venire. Yet on Lee’s jury, 9 of the 12 jurors were black or 75% of the jury. That a predominantly black jury was selected cuts in favor of the state appellate court’s conclusion that no Batson violation occurred. See United States v. Puentes, 50 F.3d 1567, 1578 (11th Cir. 1995) (“Although the presence of African-American jurors does not dispose of an allegation of racebased peremptory challenges, it is a significant factor tending to prove the paucity 112 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 113 of 128 of the claim.”); see also, e.g., United States v. Gamory, 635 F.3d 480, 496 (11th Cir. 2011) (in addition to finding prosecutor’s proffered race-neutral reason persuasive, the Court specifically noted that three African-Americans were ultimately seated on the jury). It was not unreasonable for the state appellate court to conclude that this striking pattern, which also produced a predominantly black jury, was not a per se violation under Batson. Of course, it must be considered in the totality of all other relevant circumstances, which we discuss too.
Lee also alleges that a history of racial discrimination in jury selections by the district attorney’s office demonstrates that the State was motivated by race in the jury selection. Lee’s hurdle here is that his trial counsel did not introduce, or even proffer, any evidence in the trial court to support that allegation. Rather, all trial counsel did was cite the single case of “Robert Thomas v. State.” In that case, however, the state supreme court did not find a Batson violation, but remanded the case for further proceedings. Ex parte Thomas, 601 So. 2d 56, 58–59 (Ala. 1992). We review Ex parte Thomas to show exactly what happened there. In Ex parte Thomas, the same district attorney’s office used 8 of its 11 peremptory strikes against black venire members, stating they had misdemeanor convictions and/or bad driving records, based on a document prepared by a state 113 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 114 of 128 investigator. Id. at 57. The trial court sustained the State’s objection to producing the document and overruled the defendant’s Batson motion. Id. The Alabama Supreme Court reversed and remanded, concluding that the trial court erroneously “accepte[d] at face value the State’s ostensibly facially neutral explanations for the use of its peremptory challenges, which were, with regard to three of the black veniremembers who were struck, based exclusively on information contained in the document to which only the State had access.” Id. at 58 (emphasis added). The Alabama Supreme Court noted in Ex parte Thomas that it “might be in a position to affirm” had, inter alia, the state trial court “ordered the State to produce the document that it used in exercising its peremptory challenges.” Id. at 59. The Alabama Supreme Court did not find a Batson violation, only that the defense was entitled on remand to “an opportunity to prove that the seemingly facially neutral explanations offered by the State were a sham or pretext.” Id. at 58. In Lee’s case, by contrast, prosecutor Greene turned over to Lee’s trial counsel the venire members’ criminal histories. If anything, Ex parte Thomas helps the State here, because Lee’s counsel had the criminal histories but never disputed the credibility of the prosecutor’s arrest-record reason for striking venire members Demond Martin, Alice Scott, and Johnnie Hall. Similarly, in his state direct appeal brief, Lee’s appellate counsel did not proffer any evidence either. Lee’s counsel did cite two Alabama cases prosecuted 114 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 115 of 128 by the same district attorney’s office where the same Alabama appellate court reversed based on a Batson violation. See Kynard v. State, 631 So. 2d 257, 261– 70 (Ala. Crim. App. 1993) (although venire was 35% black, the jury had 10 white jurors and 2 black jurors, or was only 17% black); Duncan v. State, 612 So. 2d 1304, 1307–11 (Ala. Crim. App. 1992) (jury composition not noted). Lee’s appellate counsel cited one case in which the Alabama appellate court affirmed, albeit concluding that the trial court had correctly seated a black juror the State struck. See Marks v. State, 581 So. 2d 1182, 1186–87 (Ala. Crim. App. 1990) (jury composition not noted). What Lee ignores is that the trials in Kynard, Duncan, and Marks occurred at least a decade before Lee’s trial and shortly after Batson was decided.36 In both Kynard and Duncan, the state appellate court found the State’s strike reasons were either not supported by the record or were pretextual based on the State’s failure to strike white venire members for the same reasons or both. In contrast, in Lee’s case that same Alabama appellate court found the prosecutor’s strike reasons were race-neutral, supported by the record, and not pretextual due to disparate treatment. 36 Specifically, in Kynard, the offense occurred on September 2, 1988, 631 So. 2d at 258– 59, and the appeal was docketed in 1990 (appeal number 90-320), which shows the trial occurred between 1988 and 1990. In Duncan, the offense occurred on October 11, 1987, 575 So. 2d 1198, 1199 (Ala. Crim. App. 1990), and the first appellate decision was on August 3, 1990, which shows the trial occurred between 1987 and 1990. In Marks, the offenses occurred between February and March of 1982, 581 So. 2d at 1183, and the appeal was docketed in 1989 (appeal number 89-410), which shows the trial occurred between 1982 and 1989. 115 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 116 of 128 As the State points out, it is telling that, in his direct appeal, Lee cited only a handful of reversals out of the thousands of cases prosecuted by this district attorney’s office, which prosecutes cases in five Alabama counties. We cannot say these few cases where the trials occurred more than a decade before Lee’s trial establish that the prosecutor’s peremptory-strike reasons in Lee’s particular case were pretextual and discriminatory.37 Before the state appellate court, Lee focused his arguments on the State’s strikes of seven black venire members. As recounted above, the state appellate court considered Lee’s arguments in light of the record and concluded that the State’s strike reasons for those seven venire members were supported by the record and did not demonstrate disparate treatment. In this appeal, although Lee continues to claim the State’s strikes against each of the 21 black venire members violated Batson, Lee’s brief before us focuses primarily on only two venire members, David Gutridge and Demond Martin, and thus we discuss them in more detail. 37 In his direct appeal, Lee also cited three cases where the Alabama courts found no Batson violation. Stephens v. State, 580 So. 2d 11 (Ala. Crim. App. 1990) (seven white jurors and five black jurors on jury in a 1987 trial); McGahee v. State, 554 So. 2d 454 (Ala. Crim. App. 1989) (all-white jury in a 1986-1987 trial); and Currin v. State, 535 So. 2d 221 (Ala. Crim. App. 1988) (70% black jury in 1987 trial). These three trials occurred at least 13 years before Lee’s 2000 trial. As discussed, in 2009, this Court concluded that the defendant in McGahee was entitled to § 2254 relief. Although we have previously discussed McGahee, we also distinguish it factually from Lee’s case later. 116 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 117 of 128
At Lee’s trial, the prosecutor stated that David Gutridge was struck because he: (1) opposed the death penalty; (2) was uncooperative in his answers to the prosecutor’s questions; and (3) had a family member convicted of a property crime. Lee I, 898 So. 2d at 813. Lee argues that the first and second reasons were false. At the outset, the state appellate court agreed that the prosecutor had mistakenly asserted that Gutridge opposed the death penalty. Id. at 815. The court remarked that a mistaken reason could support a peremptory strike so long as it was “based on an honest belief” and otherwise represented a race-neutral reason. Id. at 815–16 (internal quotation marks omitted). The court examined the record and concluded that “[t]he record does not indicate that the prosecutor’s reason was not based on an honest belief.” Id. at 816. The conclusion that an honestly mistaken but race-neutral reason for striking a black venire member did not violate Batson was not unreasonable. Concerning the prosecutor’s second reason, that Gutridge was uncooperative, the state appellate court reiterated that demeanor is a race-neutral reason for exercising a peremptory strike and that Lee at trial “did not dispute the prosecutor’s assertions about the demeanor” of Gutridge. Id. The trial record supports that fact. Additionally we note, as the voir dire transcript shows, that Gutridge did not raise his hand to answer either of the prosecutor’s questions about 117 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 118 of 128 whether panel members could impose the death penalty, and only after being singled out did Gutridge answer specifically whether he could impose it. The third reason the prosecutor struck Gutridge was because he had a “[f]amily member involved and convicted of a property crime.” During voir dire, the prosecutor asked if any venire member or a family member had been arrested and charged with a property crime. Gutridge was one of the prospective jurors who raised his hand to this question. The record thus supports this reason too. Lee also compares Gutridge with a white venire member, Edwin Ember, who answered the same question about a property crime in the affirmative but was not struck by the State. Notably, Ember did not sit on Lee’s jury. The state appellate court examined the record and found that Lee’s defense counsel had used his 12th peremptory strike on Ember, seven strikes before the State used its 19th strike on Gutridge. The court concluded that “[b]ecause the defense had long since struck veniremember [Ember] when the State struck veniremember [Gutridge], we do not find that there was any plain error in this regard.” Id. at 817. Additionally we note Ember was not similarly situated to Gutridge for yet another reason supported by the record. Ember immediately raised his hand to the question of whether he would impose the death penalty if it were the proper penalty. Ember, unlike Gutridge, was not reluctant to answer.
118 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 119 of 128 Lee contends that the state appellate court should have examined the two reasons given for striking Demond Martin, discovered that they were false, and concluded the strike was racially motivated. At trial the prosecutor had stated he struck Martin because: (1) Martin was opposed to the death penalty; and (2) he had “a bit of an arrest record.” The record supports the first reason. While Martin said that he could impose the death penalty under certain circumstances, he also told the prosecutor, “I don’t like the death penalty, I’m against it.” Like Gutridge, Martin also failed to raise his hand when the prosecutor asked the members of his voir dire panel if they felt death could be “a proper penalty given the circumstances,” and he had to be individually prodded by the prosecutor to disclose his views on the death penalty. Lee also now challenges the second reason, that Martin had a “bit of an arrest record,” as unsupported by the record. In Lee’s direct appeal, Lee made, and the state appellate court examined, a more general argument that the prosecutor’s reason for striking several black venire members (including Alice Scott and Johnnie Hall) due to their arrest records was not supported by the record. Lee I, 898 So. 2d at 816. The court observed that the prosecutor had documentation concerning the criminal histories of each of the venire members. Id. Before the parties made cause or peremptory challenges, the State provided the defense with a copy of the criminal histories of the venire members. Id. Yet, Lee’s trial counsel 119 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 120 of 128 did not contest the facts relating to the arrest record of any venire member for whom the prosecutor cited an arrest record as a reason for the strike. The court thus concluded that Lee’s contention—that the arrest record reason was pretextual—was “not supported by the record,” and found no plain error. Id. This conclusion is not unreasonable. At no time has Lee submitted any evidence to refute the prosecutor’s statement that Martin, plus Scott and Hall, had arrest records.
In sum, courts should consider all relevant circumstances in determining if a Batson violation occurred. Batson, 476 U.S. at 96, 106 S. Ct. at 1723; see also Johnson, 545 U.S. at 170, 125 S. Ct. at 2417; Miller-El, 545 U.S. at 240, 125 S. Ct. at 2325. We have examined the voir dire answers, the State’s strike reasons as to the contested venire members, and every fact or argument proffered by Lee to support his Batson claim. After doing so, and given our highly deferential AEDPA review, we conclude that the state appellate court did not unreasonably apply Batson to the facts here, i.e., all relevant circumstances in Lee’s case, and its decision is entitled to deference.38 38 In his briefs to this Court, Lee makes only passing references to 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(2) and a conclusory contention that the state courts unreasonably determined the facts. The thrust of Lee’s argument is that the state courts failed to follow Batson’s third step and unreasonably applied clearly established federal law. Thus, Lee’s claim is more appropriately analyzed under 120 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 121 of 128 Although Lee contends that there are factual parallels between his case and McGahee and Adkins, our recitation of the facts in those cases already demonstrates how materially and starkly different the evidence was in those cases from Lee’s. If anything, the evidentiary differences between this case and McGahee show how weak Lee’s Batson claim is. Lee’s jury was not all white but was 75% black, with nine black jurors and three white jurors. In Lee’s case, each of the prosecutor’s reasons for the strikes was race-neutral and supported by the record. There was no explicitly racial reason for striking any black venire member. No state court’s reasoning, given in its own opinion in Lee’s case, revealed that the court did not consider an explicitly racial reason for a venire member strike. No prosecutor gave a “low intelligence” reason historically tied to racism. The record evidence in Lee’s case is also nothing like Adkins, where only one black juror served. In Lee’s case, there is no jury list with racial notations by the prosecutor. There is no prosecutor admitting he did not consider any Batson restraints in striking black prospective jurors. There is no ex parte affidavit by the prosecutor about strike reasons. There is no augmented record, assembled well after the original trial, with extensive objections by trial counsel. There is no evidence of black venire members struck for age or answers where white venire § 2254(d)(1). McGahee, 560 F.3d at 1256 (“Where the concern is that a state court failed to follow Batson’s three steps, the analysis should be under AEDPA § 2254(d)(1) . . . .”). In any event, Lee has not shown an unreasonable determination of the facts under § 2254(d)(2). 121 Case: 12-14421 Date Filed: 08/01/2013 Page: 122 of 128 members with the same age or the same answers were not struck. Rather, in Lee’s case, the prosecutor’s race-neutral reasons for the struck venire members were largely not objected to at trial, and were supported by the trial record. Lee has failed to show any Batson violation.