Opinion ID: 776195
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Race- and-Religion-Based Reshuffling of the Jury.

Text: 152 At the close of the orderly process of jury selection, the district court faced a jury that it viewed as insufficiently racially and religiously diverse. When one of the empaneled jurors was excused because of illness, the district court formulated a novel plan in order to cure this perceived defect. As is by now familiar, the court sua sponte removed a second, and white, juror from the main panel and then filled the two newly open places on the jury with an African-American and a Jewish juror (Juror 108) respectively, both of whom were selected from the list of alternate jurors out of order. Furthermore, the record leaves no room for doubting that it was the jurors' race and religion that motivated the district court's choice of which juror to remove from the main panel and its decision to move the two chosen alternate jurors onto the main panel ahead of the non-African-American, non-Jewish jurors who were next in line. 52 153 What the district court did in its effort to achieve a racially and religiously balanced jury was unquestionably highly unusual. It was also improper. The error is made plain by the reasoning behind Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 78, 89 (1986), and Georgia v. McCollum, 505 U.S. 42, 59 (1992), in which the Supreme Court held that neither prosecutors nor defendants could, without violating the Equal Protection Clause, exercise peremptory strikes on the basis of race. After these cases it is beyond peradventure that the racial and religious reconstruction of the jury that occurred in this case could not constitutionally have been achieved at the instigation of the parties. And what the district court could not allow the parties to do, it also could not do of its own motion even with the consent of the parties. Indeed, the violation of equal protection that occurs when a person is excluded from a jury on the basis of his race (or religion) would seem only to be made more serious when the exclusion occurs at the behest not just of the parties but of the court itself, whose duties under the Equal Protection Clause are particularly strong. And, although the motives behind the district court's race- and religion-based jury selection procedures were undoubtedly meant to be tolerant and inclusive rather than bigoted and exclusionary, that fact cannot justify the district court's race-conscious actions. The significance of a jury in our polity as a body chosen apart from racial and religious manipulations is too great to permit categorization by race or religion even from the best of intentions. 154 As the Supreme Court has said, [t]he Fourteenth Amendment's mandate that race discrimination be eliminated from all official acts and proceedings of the State is most compelling in the judicial system. Powers v. Ohio, 499 U.S. 400, 415 (1991). 53 Indeed, so central is equal protection to the legitimate functioning of the courts and specifically of juries that Congress has enacted a separate statute mandating that [n]o citizen possessing all other qualifications which are or may be prescribed by law shall be disqualified for service as grand or petit juror in any court of the United States, or of any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. 18 U.S.C. § 243. This statutory prohibition, as the Supreme Court has said, makes race neutrality in jury selection a visible, and inevitable, measure of the judicial system's own commitment to the commands of the Constitution, and accordingly, [t]he courts are under an affirmative duty to enforce the strong statutory and constitutional policies embodied in that prohibition. Powers, 499 U.S. at 416. There can be no doubt that the district court's race- and religion- based jury reconstruction (no matter how well motivated) directly violated this affirmative duty and hence was unacceptable. 155 This is so, moreover, regardless of whether the racial and religious jurymandering engaged in by the court formally violated the Equal Protection Clause, or simply came to the very edge of doing so. For, even if such actions were not unconstitutional, they would still be sufficiently inappropriate to a federal court as to be subject to our inherent supervisory authority. Our authority over the district courts, though not a form of free-flowing justice, untethered to legal principle does allow us to ensure that fair standards of procedure are maintained and to review procedures used in federal courts [without being] limited to ascertaining whether they are constitutionally valid. United States v. Ming He, 94 F.3d 782, 792 (2d Cir. 1996) (citing McNabb v. United States, 318 U.S. 332, 340 (1943)). 156 The government contends, however, that since in this case the parties agreed to the racial and religious reconstruction of the jury, as they undoubtedly did, whatever objections (either constitutional or otherwise) exist to the court's action have been waived and cannot now be raised. The difficulty with this argument is that, if it were to be countenanced, parties could always, with the court's consent, empanel a jury that was of precisely the racial and religious mix that they wished. If the court was of like mind, there would be nothing to stop civil litigants from agreeing, for example, that a contract or tort action between them should be heard by a jury composed only of members of their own racial or religious groups. And all Congress's and the Supreme Court's language about race neutrality in jury selection as a measure of the judicial system's commitment to the commands of the Constitution, Powers, 499 U.S. at 416, would be a dead letter. Of course, parties can, in appropriate situations, opt out of the judicial system - say by agreeing to arbitration. And if they do so, they can choose arbiters of whatever racial or religious sorts they wish. But that is totally different from bending the judicial system to their racial and religious preferences. For, unlike private institutions, the judicial system belongs not to the parties but to the nation. 157 It is for analogous reasons that the Supreme Court has treated as unwaivable a formally similar, if substantively very different, claim involving a threat to another set of judicial structures. In Freytag v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 501 U.S. 868 (1991), the Supreme Court considered a challenge, under the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, Art II, § 2, cl. 2, to the authority of the Chief Judge of the United States Tax Court to appoint Special Trial Judges to preside over tax disputes, pursuant to 26 U.S.C. § 7441. The Court reached the merits of this claim-in spite of the fact that the petitioners had waived it by consenting to appear before such a Special Trial Judge-and found that the petitioners' challenge invoked the strong interest of the federal judiciary in maintaining the constitutional plan of separation of powers. Freytag, 501 U.S. at 879 (internal quotation marks omitted). In effect, the High Court concluded, the importance of the petitioner's claim so implicated the very structural authority of the tribunal they contested that their claim could not be waived by their individual action. See also Glidden v. Zdanok, 370 U.S. 530, 535-36 (1941) (plurality opinion) (treating an Appointments Clause objection to judicial officers as unwaivable). In Freytag, as in the case before us, the parties, in concert with the relevant judge, could, absent unwaivability, persist in using an illegitimate decision maker to the permanent detriment of the nation's judicial system. 158 Perhaps recognizing the fundamental problems that would adhere to permitting waivers of racially and religiously tested jurors, the government at oral argument in effect conceded that such arrangements should be forbidden in the future, regardless of the parties' consent. But it urged the court to permit the waiver, in view of the lack of express prior judicial disapproval of what had occurred, and to ratify, just this once, what the district court had done. 54 Thus at the first of two oral arguments held on this appeal, the following colloquy occurred: 159 The Government: There have been cases that this Court has essentially decided that certain procedures were improper and would not be condoned in the future on a prospective basis. That's happened. And this might be such a case. 160 The Court: How do we do that? Do we say that in this case [we affirm the conviction below] but in the future, if the prosecution agrees to something like this, it is acting at its peril because in the future we will reverse? 161 The Government: Sounds good. 162 The Court: What? 163 The Government: Sounds good. 164 The Court: Sounds better to you than it does to me, maybe. 165 The Government: Read it over a few times. You'll get used to it, Judge. Oral Argument Tr., May 3, 2000, at 48-49. 166 In the end, however, we need not decide whether the government's prospective only proposal should be accepted. As with the question of whether a jury, chosen as this one was, is unconstitutional or simply subject to reproval under our supervisory authority, no answer is needed to decide the case before us. This is so because of the presence on the final jury of a juror, number 108, whom we have found to be biased. 55 167 4. The Combined Effect of Juror 108 and of Race- and Religion-Based Reshuffling of the Jury. 168 The defendants before us did not consent to the empaneling of Juror 108 standing alone. They agreed to his seating only in the context of the district court's larger scheme to secure a jury that displayed the racial and religious diversity that the district court desired. In effect, the defendants, at the district court's prompting, consented to the placement of Juror 108 on the panel in exchange for the assignment to the panel, of an additional African-American juror in the place of a different white juror who would otherwise have been seated. This exchange, however, was improper, because the benefit to be received by the defendants in connection with the exchange -- the replacement by the court of a white juror with an African-American juror solely on the basis of race -- was itself improper. And this impropriety invalidated any waiver of the defendants' complaint concerning Juror 108's bias that might otherwise be found in their acceptance of the district court's larger plan. 56 169 We conclude that the district court erred in declining to remove Juror 108 from the jury for actual bias, and that the defendants' acceptance of the district court's jury-packing scheme (which placed Juror 108 on the jury) did not constitute a valid waiver of that error and of their claim of unconstitutional bias in the jury before which their case was tried. That is, we hold that a waiver to a juror's impartiality cannot be accepted when it was obtained by the promise of seating a jury with what the defendants apparently believed were desirable racial characteristics. 57 170