Opinion ID: 399872
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Denial of a Motion for Intra-District Transfer

Text: 32 Malmay also asserts that the district court abused its discretion in denying a Fed.R.Crim.P. Rule 18 motion for intradistrict transfer of venue to avoid prejudicial pre-trial publicity. The trial took place in the context of a series of trials in Sabine Parish, Vernon Parish, and Red River Parish, touching the Shreveport Division in the northern part of the state, and the Lake Charles Division in the southern part of the state. The trials were the culmination of the FBI's large-scale investigation into vote-buying schemes and the investigation was hailed as story of the year by the Shreveport Times. Professor Edward Renwick, Director of the Institute of Politics at Loyola University in New Orleans, conducted four polls of 200 registered voters each in the areas of Shreveport, Monroe, Lake Charles, and Alexandria, Louisiana, after the vote-buying investigation was under way. The poll reflected that in Shreveport, the area where the district court was sitting, forty-eight percent of those polled believed charges of vote buying they had read, seen, or heard about were true, while only seven percent believed them to be false. 33 Nevertheless, there was very little awareness of Malmay individually among the voter sample, with only fourteen percent claiming to have heard of Malmay in all four polls as whole. Asked whether Malmay was innocent or guilty, one percent of those polled said he was innocent, five percent said he was guilty, ninety-two percent said they did not know, and two percent refused to answer. Record, vol. I, at 50. This poll was conducted several months after Congressman Leach, the most well-known of the vote-buying defendants, had been acquitted. Record, vol. I, at 61. Nevertheless, the poll reflected a high degree of cynicism about the voting process. Overall, about forty-five percent of those polled believed there was vote buying in the area, combining the a lot and a little categories. In Shreveport, forty percent of those polled believed there was buying of votes on a regular basis. 34 Malmay contends that the unabating barrage of publicity surrounding the vote-buying investigations generally created a latent bias among the jurors sitting in the Shreveport area. Fed.R.Crim.P. Rule 21(a) sets forth the general standard for change of venue across districts. This rule allows the court to transfer venue when there is 35 so great a prejudice against the defendant that he cannot obtain a fair and impartial trial at any place fixed by law for holding court in that district. 36 Under Fed.R.Crim.P. Rule 18 the district court may transfer venue within the district (an option not spelled out explicitly in Rule 18, but stated by the Advisory Committee in 1966 Amendments to the Rule). Therefore, the district court had the discretion to move the trial to another court within the district. 37 The district court was not, however, required to move the trial absent a strong showing of prejudice. Courts have generally felt that voir dire examination is the appropriate mechanism for screening jurors to avoid bias. According to the due process standards established in Irvin v. Dowd, 366 U.S. 717, 81 S.Ct. 1639, 6 L.Ed.2d 751 (1961), the Constitution does not entitle a criminal defendant to a trial by a body of jurors ignorant of all facts surrounding a case, but only an impartial jury that will render a verdict based exclusively on the evidence presented in the court. Furthermore, this Court must apply the abuse of discretion standard to district court rulings on Rule 18-a standard which requires almost a compelling reason to believe the jury was biased by pre-trial publicity. 38 In the jury selection process employed, the district court addressed prospective jurors three at a time outside of the presence of the other members of the panel and asked them general questions. If any one of the three prospective jurors indicated they knew the appellant, or had any preconceived judgment in respect to vote-buying, or the like, that person would be questioned at greater length outside the presence of the other two. No juror was accepted that had any prejudice in particular from pre-trial publicity. 39 Malmay bases his pre-trial publicity charge mainly on the public opinion polls of registered voters in Shreveport and three other cities within the Western District of Louisiana and the Fourth Congressional District. While almost one-half of those surveyed felt that charges of vote buying were true in general, the defense concedes that a significant proportion of the population reflected in these surveys did not acknowledge a prejudgment of Malmay. The defendant nevertheless alleges the difficulty of separating out the large percentage of persons who had prejudged the case and found bias. The allegation of impossibility in ferreting out such latent bias in half the population is not a strong argument, especially in view of the fact that voir dire examination revealed no such bias in the jurors interrogated. Therefore, there does not appear to be any substantial ground for overturning the district court's denial of an intradistrict transfer, even though that might have been a reasonable and prudent measure to avoid any effects of the publicity.