Opinion ID: 853071
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Accident of the Alphabet

Text: Finally, and importantly, the computer organized the county jury pool by townships in alphabetical order. This placed all Wayne Township jurors at the end of the list of 14,364. Thus, in each year since 1980 all of the excluded jury pool members were Wayne Township residents. The effect of these problems was not unfocused or randomly distributed over the county or over population groups. According to the 1990 census, African-Americans comprised 18,552 or 8.5% of the total age 18 and over Allen County population of 217,332. In addition, 13,937 (75.1%) of these 18,552 African-Americans resided in Wayne Township. Accordingly, the program excluded 87% of the jury pool members from the township in which 75.1% of Allen County's age 18 and over African-Americans resided. Azania argues that the result of these problems was that in the quarterly draw from which his jury pool was taken, African-Americanswho in a truly representative system would have comprised 8.5% of the poolin fact comprised only 4.4% of the pool. The post-conviction court rejected Azania's calculation as unreliable. The court ruled that using 1990 census data as a proxy for the racial composition of the 1996 voter registration listas well as using a mathematical formula to estimate the number of African-Americans in the quarterly draw from which Azania's jury was comprisedwas akin to asking the court to make an inference from an inference, something the court is not allowed to do. The post-conviction court may be correct that African-American citizens do not necessarily register to vote in proportion to their population, but Allen County did not maintain racial information about the voter list and we have nothing to go by except the census. Both the United States Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have repeatedly upheld the use of census figures in constitutional assaults on jury selection procedures. See Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357, 365, 99 S.Ct. 664, 58 L.Ed.2d 579 (1979) (upholding the use of six-year-old census data in fair cross-section challenge); Alexander v. Louisiana, 405 U.S. 625, 627, 92 S.Ct. 1221, 31 L.Ed.2d 536 (1972) (upholding the use of six-year-old census data in equal protection challenge); Davis v. Warden, 867 F.2d 1003, 1014 (7th Cir.1989); United States v. Osorio, 801 F.Supp. 966, 977-78 (D.Conn.1992). We agree with the courts that have concluded that under these circumstances a defendant should not be expected to carry a prohibitive burden in proving underrepresentation. Davis, 867 F.2d at 1014. Similarly, because no statistical data was available regarding the number of African-Americans in the quarterly draw from which Azania's jury was comprised, it was appropriate for Azania's expert witness to use a mathematical formula derived directly from the operation of Allen County's computerized system to estimate that number.