Opinion ID: 1296355
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Trial by an Impartial Jury

Text: Georgia's Constitution also provides that an accused citizen is entitled to trial by an impartial jury. Code Ann. § 2-105. Georgia law currently provides that a juror who is unalterably opposed to the imposition of the death penalty is ineligible to serve as a juror in a capital case. Such a juror is automatically excluded from the jury by the trial judge for cause. See Code Ann. § 59-806 (4) and Eberheart v. State, 232 Ga. 247 (206 SE2d 12) (1974). In a discretionary system, such as I consider Georgia's current system to be, the automatic exclusion of jurors from serving in the trial of a capital case deprives the accused citizen of an impartial jury as mandated by the Georgia Constitution. In my separate opinion in Eberheart, supra, I said that the exclusion of the jurors for cause was erroneous, and such exclusion would require the grant of a new trial. See Peters v. Kiff, 407 U. S. 493 (92 SC 2163, 33 LE2d 83) (1972), and Prof. White's law review article, The Constitutional Invalidity of Convictions Imposed by Death-Qualified Juries, 58 Cornell L. Rev. 1176 (July, 1973). A juror who strongly and mightily believes in the imposition of the death penalty in capital cases is just as partial in a capital case as is a juror who is unalterably opposed to the imposition of the death penalty in a capital case. If one is automatically excluded by law from serving in such a case, it is my view that the other should also be automatically excluded. Georgia's discretionary system, coupled with the automatic exclusion from jury service in capital cases of non-capital-punishment-oriented-jurors, guarantees that the state will have a jury partial to it during the guilty or not guilty phase of the trial and during the discretionary sentencing phase of the trial. Georgia juries in capital cases, because of this mandatory and automatic exclusion from jury service, do not, in my opinion, reflect the conscience of the community, and such juries do not constitute a representative cross section of the community population that is constitutionally required for the determination of guilt or innocence and for determination of the sentence to be imposed in the event of conviction. I think the Georgia system with this built-in automatic exclusion of jurors violates the impartial jury provision of the Georgia Constitution (Code Ann. § 2-105) and the due process provision in the Georgia Constitution (Code Ann. § 2-103). On December 22, 1975, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts held a death penalty statute unconstitutional on state-law grounds without respect to federal constitutional law and the construction placed on the Federal Constitution by the Supreme Court of the United States. Commonwealth v. O'Neal, 339 NE2d 676 (Mass.) (1975). That court held that the statute under review violated the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights and was unconstitutional. For the reasons stated in this dissenting opinion, I would hold that the current Georgia system for imposing the death penalty violates three specific provisions of the Georgia Constitution, Code Ann. §§ 2-103, 2-105, and 2-109. I respectfully dissent.