Opinion ID: 2600689
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: introduction

Text: We granted certiorari review of two cases, People v. Washington, 179 P.3d 153 (Colo. App.2007), and People v. Sayles, No. 04CA0780, 2007 WL 2009732 (Colo.App. July 12, 2007) (not selected for publication), in which the defendants claimed that the jury-selection process in Arapahoe County systematically excluded an unfair and unreasonable number of African-Americans and Hispanics, such that the juries in their cases failed to represent a fair cross-section of the community in violation of their constitutional rights. [1] At issue in both cases is whether the practice of giving double credit to prospective jurors for service in Aurora municipal court, so that the prospective jurors in the part of Aurora located in Arapahoe County received credit toward their service rank in both Aurora's jury wheel and Arapahoe County's jury wheel, systematically excluded an unfair and unreasonable number of African-Americans and Hispanics in violation of the Sixth Amendment's fair cross-section guarantee. Of particular concern is which statistical measures should be used by a court in its analysis of a constitutional fair cross-section claim. In the first case, the trial court conducted a post-trial hearing on Petitioner Trevon Washington's motion to dismiss the jury pool. During that hearing, Washington presented statistical evidence that measured the degree of underrepresentation of African-Americans and Hispanics on jury panels in Arapahoe County at the time of his trial in terms of absolute disparity, comparative disparity, absolute impact, and statistical significance, which measures the likelihood that the underrepresentation occurred by chance. After weighing all the statistical measures presented by Washington, the trial court denied Washington's motion, finding that he had failed to demonstrate that the underrepresentation of African-Americans and Hispanics on jury panels in Arapahoe County at the time of his trial was unrepresentative of the community or a result of statistical systematic exclusion. The court of appeals affirmed the trial court's ruling, concluding that the underrepresentation was not constitutionally significant. In the second case, which was presided over by the same Arapahoe County district judge who presided over Washington's trial, Petitioner Lorenzo Sayles relied on the statistical evidence presented by Washington to support his motion for a new jury or a new trial. The trial court denied Sayles's motion for the same reasons that Washington's motion was denied. Relying on its opinion in Washington, the court of appeals affirmed the trial court's ruling. Consolidating the two cases for opinion, we hold that no specific statistical measure should be excluded in a court's analysis of a constitutional fair cross-section claim, and that a court should evaluate all the statistical evidence presented to determine whether the alleged underrepresentation is unfair and unreasonable, and thus violated the defendant's constitutional right to a jury selected from a fair cross-section of the community. Here, Washington's expert testified that the practice of giving double credit to prospective jurors for service in Aurora municipal court resulted in an underrepresentation of African-Americans and Hispanics on jury panels in Arapahoe County at the time of the defendants' trials. The expert further testified that the underrepresentation was statistically significant, meaning that it is statistically unlikely that the underrepresentation of these groups occurred by chance. Because this systematic practice resulted in a statistically significant underrepresentation of African-American and Hispanics on jury panels in Arapahoe County, we disapprove of it and direct that it be stopped immediately. As the evidence presented by the expert showed, the likelihood that the underrepresentation of African-Americans on jury panels in Arapahoe County occurred by chance was 0.008%, or eight out of every 100,000 times, and that the likelihood that the underrepresentation of Hispanics on jury panels in Arapahoe County occurred by chance was 0.120%, or 120 out of every 100,000 times. However, upon review of the other statistical evidence presented by Washington, we conclude that the underrepresentation of African-Americans and Hispanics as measured by statistical significance was minimal. As measured by absolute impact, the practice of giving double credit to prospective jurors for service in Aurora municipal court resulted in a decrease of less than one African-American and one Hispanic in every three 90- to 100-person jury panels in Arapahoe County. As measured by absolute disparity and comparative disparity, the underrepresentation of African-Americans and Hispanics here was slight when compared with other cases in which the underrepresentation violated a defendant's constitutional right to a jury selected from a fair cross-section of the community. Therefore, although we disapprove of the practice of giving double credit to prospective jurors for service in Aurora municipal court, our review of all the statistical evidence presented by Washington leads us to conclude that the underrepresentation of African-Americans and Hispanics on jury panels in Arapahoe County at the time of the defendants' trials was not unfair or unreasonable, and thus did not violate the Sixth Amendment's fair cross-section guarantee. We therefore affirm the judgments of the court of appeals. Washington and Sayles also argue that the evidence of statistical significance in this case is sufficient to establish a violation of their statutory rights under the Colorado Uniform Jury Selection and Service Act, §§ 13-71-101 to -145, C.R.S. (2007). However, because neither Washington nor Sayles raised this argument at trial, on appeal to the court of appeals, or in their petitions for certiorari review, we reject their statutory claims as untimely.