Opinion ID: 2996572
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Williams’s Individual Challenges

Text: The remaining three challenges raised solely by Williams are meritless, and we may dispose of them with minimal discussion. First, Williams argues that the district court should have dismissed his indictment. He argues that because the State of Wisconsin continued to pay the salary of the Assistant District Attorney Karine O’Byrne during her service as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney (SAUSA), her appointment violated 28 U.S.C. § 548, which provides that the Attorney General of the United States shall fix the annual salaries of SAUSAs. He further argues that since her appointment was not valid, SAUSA O’Byrne was not an “attorney[ ] for the government,” and her appearance before his indicting grand jury violated Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(d). Notwithstanding the potential for error in this arrangement, any such error is harmless. The purpose of Rule 6(d) is “to protect the innocent from being indicted.” United States v. Fountain, 840 F.2d 509, 515 (7th Cir. 1988). Because Williams was found guilty at trial, he is “not a member of the class of beneficiaries of the rule” and is not entitled to invoke it to reverse his conviction. Id. Accord United States v. Mechanik, 475 U.S. 66, 67, 71-72 (1986) (explaining that “the petit jury’s verdict of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt demonstrates a fortiori that there was probable cause to charge the defendants with the offenses for which they were convicted”); United States v. Rosario, 234 F.3d 347, 352 (7th Cir. 2000) (conviction at trial “indicates a proper grand jury proceeding would have still yielded an indictment”). Second, Williams argues that his conviction must be reversed because the government violated Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), by striking two jurors for racial reasons. Under Batson, after the defendant makes a prima facie showing that a prosecutor exercised a peremptory strike based on race, the burden shifts to the prosecutor to Nos. 01-4219, 01-4264 & 01-4339 25 provide a race-neutral explanation for the strike. Mahaffey v. Page, 162 F.3d 481, 482-83 (7th Cir. 1998). If an explanation is provided, the ultimate burden rests upon the defendant to prove that the explanation was offered as mere pretext for racial discrimination. Id. at 483. The district court found that the government’s proffer of reasons for striking these two jurors—the first juror for the observation that her difficulty in understanding the prosecutor’s voir dire questions made it likely that she would have difficulty understanding the wealth of information to be presented during the three-week trial; the second juror for his at best inattentiveness during voir dire and at worst excessive fatigue from working two jobs—was legitimate and not pretextual. We review the district court’s findings for clear error, United States v. James, 113 F.3d 721, 728 (7th Cir. 1997), keeping in mind the fact that the district court is in the best position to determine whether a reason given for a strike is mere pretext and reversing only if “the reason given is completely outlandish or there is other evidence which demonstrates its falsity.” Tinner v. United Ins. Co., 308 F.3d 697, 703 (7th Cir. 2002) (quotation omitted). Williams cannot satisfy either test. It is not completely outrageous that the government would be interested in striking jurors who it felt either could not grasp the complexities of its trial evidence or were too tired to pay attention. And Williams has presented no independent evidence demonstrating that these reasons were false: for example, he identifies no non-African-American jurors who were similarly situated (i.e., noncomprehending or inattentive and sleeping) but who were allowed to remain. See Coulter v. Gilmore, 155 F.3d 912, 921 (7th Cir. 1998) (treatment of similarly situated jurors relevant to determine discriminatory intent). His Batson challenge thus fails. Finally, Williams contends that his sentence offends Apprendi because evidence of his prior convictions, which Williams argues increased his sentence beyond the statu26 Nos. 01-4219, 01-4264 & 01-4339 tory maximum, were not proven to the jury. But Apprendi expressly reserved prior convictions from the scope of its holding. 530 U.S. at 490. And as discussed above, based on the jury’s finding of drug type and quantity, the statutory maximum that Williams faced on both charges was life in prison. The sentence he received did not exceed the statutory maximum; it was the statutory maximum. Thus, Apprendi does not apply. The prior drug convictions may have increased his statutory minimum sentence for these offenses, but this is not prohibited by Apprendi. We have recognized that the Supreme Court in Apprendi expressly declined to overrule McMillan v. Pennsylvania, 477 U.S. 79 (1986), which upheld a statutory minimum prison term that was based solely on the sentencing judge’s preponderance- of-the-evidence findings. United States v. Rodgers, 245 F.3d 961, 966 (7th Cir. 2001); see also Harris v. United States, 536 U.S. 545, 564-65 (2002); Nance, 236 F.3d at 825. In any event, the life sentence that Williams received was not dependant upon his prior conviction information, but rather the applicable guideline range, properly determined by the sentencing court to fall at the statutory maximum.