Opinion ID: 1830727
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: statistical proof

Text: Finally, defendant argues that the statistics alone sufficiently show that black prospective jurors were systematically excluded from Kent County jury pools. He contends that the persistent underrepresentation shows that random chance could not have produced such a result. In Rioux, supra, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals confronted a similar claim that statistics alone prove systematic exclusion. That court stated: Without accepting the canard that if you torture the statistics long enough, they'll say anything you want them to, it remains unclear whether statistics alone can prove systematic exclusion. Even if they can, however, they would have to be of an overwhelmingly convincing nature. Id. at 658 (internal citations omitted). Several courts, however, have clearly stated that statistics alone cannot prove systematic exclusion. See United States v. Pion, 25 F.3d 18, 24 (C.A.1, 1994) (holding that an allegation of systematic exclusion based on statistics alone was pure speculation); United States v. Garcia, 991 F.2d 489, 492 (C.A.8, 1993) (holding that numerical underrepresentation is not a proxy for systematic exclusion); Howard, supra at 1160, 5 Cal.Rptr.2d 268, 824 P.2d 1315 (A defendant cannot carry this burden with nothing more than statistical evidence of a disparity. One must, in addition, show that the disparity is the result of an improper feature of the jury selection process). Even presuming that defendant could rely exclusively on statistics, he has not made an adequate showing. In Duren, the Court noted that the defendant proved that a large discrepancy was occurring in every weekly venire for a period of nearly a year. Duren, supra at 366, 99 S.Ct. 664. Here, defendant's proof may satisfy any duration requirement, because there was some underrepresentation in five of the six periods surveyed, but the disparities over that time were nowhere near as large as those in Duren. The absolute disparity in Duren was thirty-nine percent, and the comparative disparity was sixty-five percent. [16] In the instant case, defendant could not make a showing of unfair and unreasonable underrepresentation under any of the disparity analyses. Thus the defendant's statistics are not so overwhelmingly convincing. Without a showing that the disparity was the result of an improper feature, Howard, supra at 1160, 5 Cal.Rptr.2d 268, 824 P.2d 1315, defendant cannot prevail.