Opinion ID: 703968
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Defendants' Proffered Explanations

Text: 28 The district court credited the defendants' explanations for two of their three strikes against black venire members but did not credit their explanations for the third strike, the one used against Ms. Robertson. The defendants first proffered that they had struck Ms. Robertson because they, who were from rural Alabama, wanted to exclude urbanites from the jury. Ms. Robertson resided in metropolitan Birmingham. Although this would have been a race-neutral reason, we are not surprised that the district court was skeptical about it being the real reason for the strike. As the district court found, several unstruck white jurors were from metropolitan areas or did not reside in the part of Alabama close to the defendants' homes. 29 Second, the defendants proffered that juror Robertson was undesirable from their perspective, because she works for Blue Cross, and she had a math degree which tells me she's an--my experience with math majors and people who deal with exact figures is that they need exact answers, and they intend [sic] to get hung up when dealing with generalities and things such as human error. However, as the district court noted, the defendants failed to explain adequately why they did not strike white venire members who worked with numbers, such as one who was a bank accountant, and another who worked as an adjustor for Ford Motor Credit. 30 We recognize that failing to strike a white juror who shares some traits with a struck black juror does not itself automatically prove the existence of discrimination. See Hollingsworth v. Burton, 30 F.3d 109, 112-13 (11th Cir.1994), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 115 S.Ct. 944, 130 L.Ed.2d 888 (1995). But we are also mindful that we review the district court's findings about whether a particular strike was racially motivated only for clear error, and [w]here there are two permissible views of the evidence, the factfinder's choice between them cannot be clearly erroneous. Anderson, 470 U.S. at 574, 105 S.Ct. at 1511. In this case the district court conducted a thorough examination of the proffered reasons and did not commit clear error in finding that the real reason the defendants struck Ms. Robertson was her race. 31 Because the district court did not err in finding that the government had made a prima facie showing of racial discrimination in the defendants' use of their peremptory strikes, and because it did not err in finding that Ms. Robertson was struck because of her race, we reject the defendants' contention that the court erred in disallowing that strike.