Opinion ID: 1407576
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the concept of a neutral jury

Text: Central to the resolution of the Witherspoon issue is the concept of a constitutionally neutral jury. Since this concept has a particular meaning, one which is occasionally misperceived, [41] it is necessary to consider the concept in some detail. When the Supreme Court in Witherspoon held that as arbiter of the punishment to be imposed, this jury fell woefully short of that impartiality to which the petitioner was entitled under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments, [42] it was not ruling that any of the jurors who actually sat on Witherspoon's penalty trial were themselves biased in a constitutional sense. If this had been the court's concern, it would have ordered that such jurors be excluded from future capital cases. Instead, the high court was relying on a different facet of the constitutional requirement of impartiality, an aspect that has been referred to as a guarantee of diffused impartiality. [43] It is denoted in this opinion (and in Witherspoon [44] ) as neutrality. (4) A neutral jury is one drawn from a pool which reasonably mirrors the diversity of experiences and relevant viewpoints of those persons in the community who can fairly and impartially try the case. [45] The concept of neutrality through diversity is demonstrated by the holding in Witherspoon. Assume that a jury must be empanelled to determine the question of punishment in a capital case. In the group of persons from the community who are statutorily competent to act as trial jurors, [46] it can be expected that an entire spectrum of beliefs concerning the infliction of capital punishment  from persons who would invariably and automatically refuse to impose capital punishment [47] to jurors who would automatically vote to impose the death penalty following a conviction for a capital offense [48]  would be found. This spectrum of community viewpoints may be depicted as follows: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | AUTOMATIC | FAVOR | INDIFFERENT | OPPOSE | AUTOMATIC | | DEATH | DEATH | GROUP | DEATH | LIFE | | PENALTY | PENALTY | | PENALTY | IMPRISONMENT | | GROUP | GROUP | | GROUP | GROUP | |----------------|------------|---------------|-----------|----------------| | will | favors the | neither | opposes | will | | automatically | death | favors nor | or has | automatically | | vote for | penalty | opposes the | doubts | vote for life | | the death | but will | death | about the | imprisonment | | penalty | not vote | penalty | death | | | | to impose | | penalty | | | | it in | | but will | | | | every | | not auto- | | | | case. | | matically | | | | | | vote | | | | | | against | | | | | | it in | | | | | | every | | | | | | case. | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Under the state procedure in effect at the time Witherspoon's penalty was determined, all persons in the oppose death penalty group and the automatic life imprisonment group were excluded for cause. Thus, Witherspoon's jury was drawn from a pool of persons which did not reflect the range of community viewpoints on a critical aspect of the case. [49] It also contained at least one group  the favor death penalty group  whose members came into trial with preconceived attitudes about the imposition of the death penalty which tended to favor one of the litigants, i.e., the prosecution. In holding that a jury so constituted crossed the line of neutrality, [50] the court found that the jury was not impartial within the meaning of the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments because it was too narrowly drawn. Members of the community who could obey the oath to fairly decide the case before them were excluded. [51] As a result, a segment of the population that would tend to be favorable toward the accused was eliminated. The resulting jury was less than neutral with respect to penalty so a reversal of the penalty determination was required. Clearly, the constitutional principle of achieving jury neutrality through diversity is relevant to a determination of guilt as well as penalty. Every juror brings to the guilt phase a number of personal characteristics which will play an inevitable role in assessing the accused's guilt or degree of guilt. (See Witherspoon v. Illinois, supra, 391 U.S. at p. 519 [20 L.Ed.2d at p. 783].) As members of this court have recently observed, each juror brings to the deliberations [on guilt or innocence] his personal store of experience, knowledge, and judgment; these are the tools by which he tests `the credibility, the probability of the testimony of witnesses, or of the inferences to be drawn from circumstances....' ( People v. Brigham (1979) 25 Cal.3d 283, 299 [157 Cal. Rptr. 905, 599 P.2d 100] (conc. opn. of Mosk, J.) quoting Trickett, Preponderance of Evidence, and Reasonable Doubt (1906) 10 The Forum 75, 82.) In addition, the juror must determine whether the evidence thus evaluated amounts to proof beyond a reasonable doubt of the truth of the charges. The difficulty in defining this elusive and undefinable state of mind has been chronicled by scholars. [52] Each of us, in effect, has his own subjective sense of when a chance of innocence can be disregarded as de minimis, but our respective senses are surely different. [53] Manifestly, fair and impartial jurors will bring to the determination of guilt a diversity of experience, knowledge, judgment, and viewpoints, as well as differences in their thresholds of reasonable doubt. If some of these jurors are systematically removed from the guilt determination, this may result in a disproportionate elimination of persons with characteristics favorable to the accused. If so, the ensuing jury will be less than neutral with respect to guilt, just as the jury at the penalty phase in Witherspoon was not neutral with respect to penalty. [54] Including diverse viewpoints on a jury serves several purposes. [55] Diversity aids the accuracy of jury decision making by counter-balancing ... various biases of the jury members. ( Ballew v. Georgia, supra, 435 U.S. at p. 234 [55 L.Ed.2d at p. 242].) As this court recently noted in a fair-cross-section case, in our heterogeneous society jurors will inevitably belong to diverse and often overlapping groups defined by race, religion, ethnic or national origin, sex, age, education, occupation, economic condition, place of residence, and political affiliation; ... it is unrealistic to expect jurors to be devoid of opinions, preconceptions, or even deep-rooted biases derived from their life experiences in such groups; and hence ... the only practical way to achieve an overall impartiality is to encourage the representation of a variety of such groups on the jury so that the respective biases of their members, to the extent they are antagonistic, will tend to cancel each other out. ( People v. Wheeler (1978) 22 Cal.3d 258, 266-267, fn. omitted [148 Cal. Rptr. 890, 583 P.2d 748].) Diversity serves to complement as well as neutralize viewpoints and attitudes. Diversity enhances the accuracy of a jury's decision making by improving its ability to recognize and appropriately evaluate evidence. Testimony from the hearing below, as well as studies in social psychology, help to explain why this is so. Human perception is selective, influenced by the very beliefs and attitudes which venirepersons bring into the courtroom. New data which tend to contradict one's beliefs may be quickly forgotten or may not even be perceived in the first place. The members of a homogeneously composed jury are more likely to perceive evidence in a similar fashion. Also, they are more likely to filter out any evidence inconsistent with their shared attitudes and values. Insofar as a jury is composed of members whose attitudes, preconceptions, and experiences are diverse, the jury is more likely to perceive and remember all the important evidence and arguments presented at trial. In similar fashion, the human mind often tends to make any new information with which it is confronted logically consistent with its prior conscious beliefs. Thus, if a juror's beliefs do not correspond to the evidence presented at trial, the juror's rational nature may tend to impel him or her to distort or exclude the perception so as to protect the apparent reasonableness of the belief. Thus, diversity provides a corrective to the distortions which can occur when the evidence presented at trial is inconsistent with the preconceptions of some members of the jury. Jury diversity helps to insure the full and accurate consideration of the evidence presented at trial in another way. A jury resolves conflicting propositions of fact and does so by drawing inferences from physical evidence and the testimony of witnesses. Yet [f]acts are always elusive and often two-faced. What may appear to one to imply guilt may carry no such overtones to another. ( Johnson v. Louisiana, supra, 406 U.S. at p. 392 [32 L.Ed.2d at p. 177] (dis. opn. of Douglas, J.).) As this court noted more than a century ago, the human mind is so constituted, that facts and circumstances do not always produce the same results; the judgment of two men upon the same set of facts may be diametrically opposite, particularly in the determination of a criminal case, when every doubt is carefully weighed and scrupulously balanced. ( People v. Stewart (1857) 7 Cal. 140, 144.) If a jury is accurately to assess evidence, it should have some expertise both in generating the inferences which may reasonably be drawn from the evidence and in evaluating the relative plausibility of the competing inferences. The greater the diversity of individual viewpoints and experiences on the jury panel, the broader the range of appropriate inferences the jury can draw from the evidence at trial and the more knowledgeable their interpretation and weighing of these inferences one against the other. For example, jurors in criminal cases are often called upon to infer mental states from behavior. In a culturally pluralistic society, particular behavior can have dramatically different meanings to members of different subcultures. A jury with diverse membership will recognize a fuller range of possible meanings or explanations for particular behavior, and it will be able to evaluate those possible meanings in light of the diverse experiences of the panel members regarding values, norms, behavior, motivation, and psychology. Finally, even if the evidence and inferences were agreed upon by all jurors, the legal effect may be subject to dispute. For example, jurors must determine whether the evidence amounts to proof beyond a reasonable doubt of the guilt of the accused. However, jurors' thresholds of reasonable doubt will necessarily differ. Diversity of viewpoint and experience on the jury tends to insure that the common sense of the community is accurately expressed in applying this standard to the facts. Of course, a juror's attitudes, experiences, knowledge, judgment, and threshold of reasonable doubt are not the sole factors which decide how that juror votes. Rather, as the defense experts repeatedly testified below, the weight of the evidence is the primary determinant of the juror's decision. Thus, Kalven and Zeisel reported in their classic study, The American Jury, that roughly one-third of the juries to which criminal cases have been submitted reach a unanimous verdict for acquittal or conviction on the very first ballot. ( Supra, p. 488.) That means, Dr. Zeisel testified with respect to these cases, that whatever differences between personalities exist, [they] are overwhelmed by the clarity of the evidence, be it for acquittal or conviction. The corollary to this finding is that in two-thirds of criminal trials, the jurors disagree in their initial ballot. [56] Since the 12 jurors were exposed to the identical external events or stimuli  i.e., the same witnesses, evidence, instructions, courtroom personalities, preliminary deliberations (if any)  the inescapable conclusion is, as Dr. Zeisel testified, that there must be something inside these people which makes them differ. It is petitioner's contention under the Witherspoon analysis that the process of death-qualifying a jury produces a jury whose composition is unbalanced. It tends disproportionately to remove from the jury pool those persons who have something inside which results in their voting in favor of the accused more often than do persons who remain. As a result, jurors drawn from the remaining pool will tend to vote in favor of the prosecution more often than would jurors drawn from a pool which includes a more complete spectrum of attitudes on capital punishment. [57] (5) One final point deserves emphasis. In determining the constitutional neutrality of a death-qualified jury, it is unnecessary to make any judgment that one viewpoint, attitude, experience, etc., is preferable, morally or legally, to any other. What is essential under this analysis is that none of these viewpoints, attitudes, experiences, etc., are systematically excluded from the jury pool, either directly or by de facto operation of otherwise neutral laws or practices, to the detriment of the accused.