Opinion ID: 776195
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Significance of Defendant's Consent to the Seating of Juror 108

Text: 140 The district court's error in failing to strike Juror 108 for cause, coupled with its subsequently empaneling the biased juror, would ordinarily require us, without further analysis, to vacate the judgment of conviction and remand the case for a new trial before an unbiased fact finder. This case, however, presents an additional and crucial complication, namely that the defendants -- after originally objecting to the district court's failure to dismiss Juror 108 for cause -- subsequently did not merely fail to challenge the plan by means of which the district court placed Juror 108 on the main jury panel. Instead, they, both through their counsel, and by their own direct personal statements, expressly consented to the scheme. 141 The government argues that this express consent constituted a waiver -- that is, the intentional relinquishment or abandonment of a known right, Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U.S. 458, 464 (1938) -- of the defendants' objections to the district court's refusal to strike Juror 108 for cause. And the same consent, the government asserts, also negated whatever possible objections the defendants might have had to the failure of impartiality that might have been imparted to the jury as a result of empaneling Juror 108. As the government points out, a mere forfeiture, or failure timely to assert a right, does not preclude appellate review for plain error under Fed. R. Crim. P. 52(b), but a waiver bars even this highly deferential form of reexamination. United States v. Olano, 507 U.S. 725, 733 (1993); see also United States v. Yu-Leung, 51 F.3d 1116, 1121 (2d Cir. 1995) ([F]orfeiture does not preclude appellate consideration of a claim in the presence of plain error, whereas waiver necessarily `extinguishes' the claim altogether. (quoting Olano, 507 U.S. at 733)) Thus, the government contends, that the defendants, by agreeing to the plan that placed this juror on the panel, have extinguished the Sixth Amendment and due process rights that they now seek to assert on appeal. 49 142 We reject the government's argument. First, we have substantial doubts about whether the right to be tried by an impartial tribunal is waivable, at least once a for-cause challenge has been made. Moreover, we conclude that, even if the right is waivable, the defendants' acceptance of an improper jury selection plan, only one part of which involved the empaneling of Juror 108, does not constitute a valid waiver. 143 Some time ago, we indicated in powerful dicta that the right to an impartial fact finder might be inherently unwaivable. We said: 144 It has been asserted that a defendant cannot waive those rights without enforcement of which the proceedings against him would be fundamentally unfair. Among such non-waivable rights would be the right to be tried by an impartial tribunal, the right to be tried by a court free from mob domination-- and the right not to be convicted solely upon the basis of a coerced confession. Perhaps Mr. Justice Frankfurter was referring to this concept of non-waivable rights when he said [that ordinary principles of waiver] `do not touch one of those extraordinary cases in which a substantial claim goes to the very foundation of a proceeding. . . . .' 145 United States v. Fay, 300 F.3d 345, 350-51 (2d Cir. 1962) (quoting Brown v. Allen, 344 U.S. 443, 503 (1993) (internal citation omitted and emphasis added). 50 146 In expressing our continued allegiance to this dicta, we begin by making clear what we do not question. Thus we do not take issue with the uncontestable principle, applied in any number of cases dealing with any number of contexts, that even mere forfeiture of claims, including claims that attack the fundamental fairness of criminal proceedings, precludes all but plain error review of district court decisions. See generally Olano, 507 U.S. at 732. Nor do we assert that the technical requirements of Fed. R. Crim. P. 24(c), which govern the selection of alternate jurors and their movement onto the main panel, are unwaivable. See, e.g., United States v. Viserto, 596 F.2d 531, 539-40 (2d Cir. 1979) (finding express consent to a technical deviation from these procedures to constitute a valid waiver of the defendants' right to challenge this deviation on appeal); United States v. Josefik, 753 F.2d 585, 588 (7th Cir. 1985) (same); United States v. Baccari, 489 F.2d 274, 275 (10th Cir. 1973) (same); Leser v. United States, 358 F.2d 313, 317 (9th Cir. 1966) (same). Similarly, we, of course, do not suggest that the right to trial before an impartial jury cannot be waived in favor of trial by an impartial judge, or, indeed, waived altogether in favor of a guilty plea. See Singer v. United States, 380 U.S. 24, 36 (1965) (discussing the waiver of a jury trial in favor of a bench trial); McCarthy v. United States, 394 U.S. 459 (1969) (discussing the circumstances in which a guilty plea waives the right to stand trial). And we do not imply that all claims of structural error (of error that requires automatic reversal rather than harmless error review) are unwaivable. See Freytag v. Comm'r of Internal Revenue, 501 U.S. 868, 896 (1991) (Scalia, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment) (arguing that many forms of structural error may for many purposes be waived). Finally, we do not assert that the presence of a possibly biased juror, whose bias has never been challenged by defendants at voir dire, necessarily taints the jury panel. 51 147 Instead of addressing these or other broader questions, we limit our concern to the very narrow set of facts before us. Where the trier of fact in a criminal trial is a biased jury that resulted from a district court's erroneous failure to grant a for-cause challenge to an actually biased juror whose bias was revealed at voir dire, we question whether a defendant can subsequently waive his claim that he has been deprived of the right to be tried before an impartial fact finder. At the root of our concern is the fundamental, indeed foundational, role impartiality plays in our system of courts. Thus, quite apart from offending the Sixth Amendment, trying an accused before a jury that is actually biased violates even the most minimal standards of due process. See In re Murchison, 349 U.S. 133, 136 (1955) (A fair trial in a fair tribunal is a basic requirement of due process.); cf. In re Oliver, 333 U.S. 257 (1948); Tumey v. Ohio, 273 U.S. 510 (1927). 148 Having said all of this, we do not need to decide today whether in every such case the seating of a clearly biased juror who had earlier been challenged is unwaivable. For it is clearly the case that, even if such an act is waivable, the waiver must be totally free and uncoerced and any consideration given for the consent must be utterly free from taint. It must be so to overcome what the Supreme Court has called the presumption against the waiver of constitutional rights. Brookhart v. Janis, 384 U.S. 1, 4 (1966). And we do not believe that the consideration given in this case comes close to meeting this test. 149 In the context most nearly analogous to the one before us -- the waiver, by guilty plea, of the right (among others) to trial by jury, see McCarthy v. United States, 394 U.S. 459 (1969) -- the presumption against a valid consent plays itself out in the form of the rule that a guilty plea is good only if entered by one fully aware of the direct consequences of [the plea], including the actual value of any commitments made to him by the court. Brady v. United States, 397 U.S. 742, 755 (1970) (internal quotation marks omitted). Accordingly, a guilty plea -- and the waiver of the right to trial by jury accomplished by the entry of that plea -- may be invalidated if it is induced by... misrepresentation (including... unfulfillable promises), or, perhaps, by promises that are by their nature improper. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). That is, as Brady says, the quid pro quo must be both fullfilable and proper. Thus, a guilty plea obtained by promising a defendant cigarettes, liquor, or unlimited spousal visitation rights, even if these promises were fulfillable, would not stand. 150 With these requirements in mind, and to see whether the consent given to the seating of Juror 108 was valid, we must examine what the defendants were offered in exchange for their waiver. 151