Opinion ID: 31577
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Representative Venire

Text: Hearn argues that his constitutional rights to an impartial jury and to a venire consisting of a representative cross-section of the community were violated by the Dallas County jury system. Apparently, Dallas County pays jurors only five dollars per day, which results in Hispanics, persons 18 to 34 years old, and persons from households with incomes under $35,000 being underrepresented in venires and juries. Hearn cites Taylor v. Louisiana in support of his argument. 419 U.S. 522, 538 (1975) (holding that the “venires from which juries are drawn must not systematically exclude distinctive groups in the community and thereby fail to be reasonably representative thereof”). Hearn’s argument fails on its face. As the Supreme Court noted, the issue in Taylor was the constitutionality of “Art. VII, § 41, of the Louisiana Constitution, and Art. 402 of the Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedure[, which] provided that a woman should not be selected for jury service unless she had previously filed a written declaration of her desire to be subject to jury service.” Id. at 523. 8 There is no comparable constitutional or legal provision in this case which explicitly provides for the exclusion of a distinctive group. Instead, Hearn complains that the low daily fee paid to jurors by Dallas County results in the underrepresentation of three groups, which are distinguished based on their ethnicity, age, and income. The Supreme Court held that “venires from which juries are drawn must not systematically exclude distinctive groups in the community and thereby fail to be reasonably representative thereof.” Id. at 538 (emphasis added). In Taylor, there was clear evidence of a systematic effort to exclude women, but there is no such evidence here. Louisiana explicitly designed its system to exclude women, but the underrepresentation Hearn complains of is an indirect consequence of the low daily fee paid to jurors in Dallas County. Defendants are not entitled to a jury, jury wheel, pool of names, panel, or venire of any particular composition, and there is no requirement that those bodies “mirror the community and reflect the various distinctive groups in the population.” Id. For this reason, the underrepresentation alleged by Hearn is not unconstitutional.