Opinion ID: 4469685
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Jury Selection Claims

Text: Dennes also seeks a COA based on a claim that the trial court violated his Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment right to be tried by an impartial jury by denying his challenges for cause to two prospective jurors. Dennes contends that two venire members, Richard Miller and Martha Jean Gutierrez, were biased and that challenges for cause should have been granted as to both because their views would prevent or substantially impair the performance of their duties as jurors in accordance with their oaths. Dennes argues that the trial court erroneously required him to exercise his peremptory strikes to remove those jurors, and he was denied effective use of additional peremptory strikes whereby he would have removed two other allegedly biased jurors, 19 Case: 17-70010 Document: 00515259502 Page: 20 Date Filed: 01/06/2020 No. 17-70010 Irene B. Collins and Belle Symmank. The TCCA rejected this claim on the basis of state law. The district court assumed arguendo that Miller and Gutierrez should have been removed for cause according to federal constitutional law, but because the record reflected that the trial court granted Dennes two additional peremptory strikes, after which both parties “promptly accepted the next juror on the list as the twelfth juror,” Dennes failed to make any showing “that any of the jurors, including the alternates, were not impartial.” Dennes, 2017 WL 1102697, at . The court reasoned that “[a]t most, Dennes was forced to accept an alternate juror who he would have challenged if he had an additional peremptory challenge,” and thereby failed to demonstrate a Sixth Amendment violation. Id. The Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee an accused the right to a trial by an impartial jury, but the forced use of a peremptory challenge does not rise to the level of a constitutional violation. See Ross v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 81, 85–88, 108 S. Ct. 2273, 2277–78 (1988). Rather, a “district court’s erroneous refusal to grant a defendant’s challenge for cause is only grounds for reversal if the defendant establishes that the jury which actually sat to decide his guilt or innocence was not impartial.” United States v. Snarr, 704 F.3d 368, 386 (5th Cir. 2013) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted); see also Jones v. Dretke, 375 F.3d 352, 355 (5th Cir. 2004) (“As a general rule, a trial court’s erroneous venire rulings do not constitute reversible constitutional error ‘so long as the jury that sits is impartial.’” (internal citation omitted)). Even assuming that the trial court should have granted Dennes’s challenges for cause, Dennes cannot establish a constitutional violation because he used peremptory strikes to exclude both Miller and Gutierrez from the jury. See Ross, 487 U.S. at 85–88, 108 S. Ct. at 2277–78. Therefore, “[a]ny claim that the jury was not impartial . . . must focus not on [Miller and 20 Case: 17-70010 Document: 00515259502 Page: 21 Date Filed: 01/06/2020 No. 17-70010 Gutierrez], but on the jurors who ultimately sat.” Id. at 86, 108 S. Ct. at 2277. Although Dennes asserts that Collins and Symmank were actually biased jurors who sat on his guilt-innocence and punishment phases of trial, he fails to identify how or why they were biased or why his counsel did not use peremptory strikes to remove them. Accordingly, there was no constitutional violation because the challenged jurors were removed from the jury by Dennes’s use of peremptory challenges and Dennes cannot establish that he was sentenced by a partial jury. Id. Reasonable jurists would not debate the district court’s application of the law governing juror selection and peremptory strikes in capital trials to the decisions made by the state courts.