Opinion ID: 786766
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Guilt-Phase Challenge to Jury Venire

Text: 58 Sanders also argues that the under-representation of Hispanics on his jury violated his Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury drawn from a representative cross-section of the community. In Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 95 S.Ct. 692, 42 L.Ed.2d 690 (1975), the United States Supreme Court recognized that the selection of a petit jury from a representative cross section of the community is an essential component of the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial. Id. at 528, 95 S.Ct. 692. 59 To state a prima facie violation of the representative cross section requirement, a defendant must show that (1) the group alleged to have been 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 persons in the community; and (3) this under-representation is due to systematic exclusion of the group in the jury-selection process. Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357, 364, 99 S.Ct. 664, 58 L.Ed.2d 579 (1979). If the petitioner makes a prima facie showing under Duren, the burden shifts to the state to justify the under-representation by demonstrating that attainment of a fair cross section is incompatible with a significant state interest. Thomas v. Borg, 159 F.3d 1147, 1150 (9th Cir.1998); see also Duren, 439 U.S. at 367-68, 99 S.Ct. 664. 60 It is undisputed that Sanders has met the first prong because Hispanics are a `distinctive' group for purposes of Sixth Amendment analysis. United States v. Nelson, 137 F.3d 1094, 1101 (9th Cir.1998). We hold, however, that he has not met the second prong. 61 The second prong ... requires proof, typically statistical data, that the jury pool does not adequately represent the distinctive group in relation to the number of such persons in the community. United States v. Esquivel, 88 F.3d 722, 726 (9th Cir.1996). In determining whether a particular group is underrepresented in a jury venire, we use an absolute disparity analysis. Borg, 159 F.3d at 1150. We determine absolute disparity by taking the percentage of the group at issue in the total population and subtracting from it the percentage of that group that is represented on the master jury wheel. United States v. Sanchez-Lopez, 879 F.2d 541, 547 (9th Cir.1989). 62 Here, Sanders is unable to provide the statistics necessary for this court to determine the absolute disparity in his case, Borg, 159 F.3d at 1150, because the statistics he offers fail to take any account of undocumented immigrants and other legitimately ineligible jurors within the total Hispanic population. Sanders' argument for disparity comes from testimony of Dr. Terry Newell, based on Newell's study of jury venires in Kern County, California (where Sanders' trial was held) from 1980 to 1981. At that time, Kern County compiled its master jury list from voter registration records. 63 Dr. Newell used the following method to determine underrepresentation on the jury venire. First, he relied on the 1980 census figures for the total population and total Hispanic population of Kern County. 7 The census listed a total population of 402,089 individuals in Kern County, including 87,025 Hispanic individuals, from which Newell calculated the Hispanic percentage of the total population to be 21.59 percent. 8 Recognizing that the census numbers for total population and total Hispanic population included noncitizens — persons presumptively ineligible to serve on a jury — Newell attempted to estimate the number of Hispanic citizens in Kern county. In that calculation, however, he used a method that is insufficient on its face. Using data from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, he obtained both the total number of legal, registered aliens in Kern County (14,387) and the number of legal, registered aliens in Kern County whose country of origin was Mexico (10,230). He then subtracted the total number of legal, registered aliens from the census count of the total population of Kern County (402,089 minus 14,387, or 387,702), and the number of legal, registered aliens from Mexico from the total number of Hispanics in Kern County (87,025 minus 10,230, or 76,795). He compared those two numbers to produce an estimate of the percentage of the citizen population that was Hispanic, which he put at 19.81 percent. 9 He then used a statistical technique that we need not describe here to account for the percentage of that population who were adults, ultimately estimating the total adult-and-citizen Hispanic population in Kern County at 16.3 percent of the total adult-and-citizen population. He compared this estimate of the adult-and-citizen Hispanic population with the percentage of Hispanics in the jury venire (which he estimated as 8.3 percent) to find an absolute disparity of 8 percentage points between the percentage of adult Hispanic citizens in the general population and the percentage of Hispanics in the jury venire. 64 The flaw in Newell's methodology is his assumption that every adult Hispanic person in Kern County who was not a legal, registered immigrant from Mexico was a jury-eligible United States citizen. This assumption ignored the probability that some Hispanic noncitizens were either illegal immigrants or did not originally come from Mexico. We need not engage in sophisticated statistical analysis to conclude that Newell's assumption is highly likely to have substantially overstated the number of Hispanic jury-eligible citizens, and thus to have substantially overstated the disparity between the percentage of Hispanics in the county and the percentage of Hispanics in the jury venire. 10 Dr. Newell made no attempt to control for the effects of illegal immigration. 65 In United States v. Artero, 121 F.3d 1256, 1262 (9th Cir.1997), we rejected a challenge based on the underrepresentation of Hispanics in the jury venire when the challenge was based only on a comparison between the number of Hispanics in the total population and those in the jury wheel, instead of between the population of Hispanics who were jury-eligible citizens and those in the jury wheel. Although Sanders, unlike the defendant in Artero, has made some attempt to separate out citizens from noncitizens, the methodology employed is so inadequate that it cannot answer the right question, which is whether Hispanics eligible to serve on ... juries were unreasonably underrepresented because of systematic exclusion. Id. at 1261. Rather, it addresses a different question, whether Hispanics, whether eligible to serve on ... juries or not, were represented in jury wheels at a lower rate than their proportion of the population as a whole. Id. 66 We take no position as to what statistical methods may be more appropriate in estimating the percentage of undocumented immigrants or other noncitizens within a total population, and recognize that it may be difficult to calculate such numbers with precision. However, where no attempt whatsoever has been made to account for the percentage of undocumented immigrants within a total population that is likely to contain such persons, we are unable to perform the necessary inquiry in a prima facie Sixth Amendment jury-venire challenge: discovering whether the systematic exclusion of a distinctive group has prevented the group from being fairly and reasonably represented in the jury venire. 11 As we noted in rejecting similarly flawed statistics in Artero, A statistical study that fails to correct for salient explanatory variables, or even to make the most elementary comparisons, has no value as causal explanation. Id. at 1262 (internal quotation marks and alteration omitted). Therefore, we hold that Sanders has not established a prima facie Sixth Amendment violation.