Opinion ID: 1830727
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: systematic exclusion

Text: As a final step in establishing a fair cross-section violation, defendant must show that the underrepresentation of black jurors was systematic, that is, inherent in the particular jury-selection process utilized. Duren, supra at 366, 99 S.Ct. 664. Like the trial court and the dissenting judge in the Court of Appeals, although I am sympathetic to defendant's position, I simply am not persuaded that defendant has carried his burden on this step. Therefore, because I had considered defendant's challenge under the glancing ahead approach of Hubbard, he has similarly failed to carry the second step of the Duren analysis.
Defendant primarily argues that the selection of district court jurors before circuit court jurors systematically excluded black jurors from the circuit court pool. By first allocating jurors for district courts in the city of Grand Rapids, with its 18.5 percent black population, and other district courts in Kent County, he contends that most of the available black jurors were siphoned away from the circuit court jury pools. He compares his case to People v. Hubbard, supra, in which prospective jurors were sent a questionnaire for either district court only or circuit court only depending on their residence. In that case, the defendant showed that this preselection for district court was directing seventy-five percent of black prospective jurors in the county to district court, with only the remaining twenty-five percent available for circuit court. The Court of Appeals held this to be a systematic exclusion. Id. at 480-482, 552 N.W.2d 493. Although the instant case and Hubbard have facial similarities, defendant has not shown the effect that similarity had on his case. In Hubbard, testimony established that seventy-five percent of jury-eligible black adults were excluded from circuit court jury service because of the allocation system. Here, however, defendant has not shown how the alleged siphoning of black jurors to district court affected circuit court juries. No evidence has shown that district court juries contained more, fewer, or a number approximately equal to the number of minority jurors appearing in circuit court. Defendant has the burden of proof on this issue, but has left me to my own speculation. [15] He thus has not carried his burden of proof. By holding that defendant has not carried his burden on this issue, I do not condone the practice of selecting district court jurors before circuit court jurors. Such a system was shown to work a constitutional violation in Hubbard. Here, though, defendant has simply failed to show that Kent County's former practice effected a constitutional violation.
Defendant secondly asserts that the system contained factors that could be anticipated to disparately affect black prospective jurors, yet failed to account for that disparate effect. For example, defendant argues that Kent County could anticipate that questionnaires returned as undeliverable would more likely have been returned from an area with a large minority population. Similarly, he argues that minorities are more likely to be nonresponsive to juror questionnaires, and Kent County's failure to effectively pursue nonresponsive questionnaire recipients leads to a smaller number of prospective black jurors. He further asserts that allowing excuses for personal reasons, like lack of child care or transportation, also leads to a smaller number of black prospective jurors because black Americans are more likely to suffer from these types of problems. These problems, however, are not inherent in the particular jury selection process formerly used in Kent County. First, [t]he inability to serve juror questionnaires because they were returned as undeliverable is not due to the system itself, but to outside forces, such as demographic changes. Rioux, supra at 658. Kent County is not required to account for demographic changes in its jury selection process; all that is required is that jury wheels, pools of names, panels, or venires from which juries are drawn must not systematically exclude distinctive groups.... Taylor, supra at 538, 95 S.Ct. 692. Similarly, defendant's argument based on Kent County's decision not to pursue prospective jurors that did not return questionnaires fails because it does not address whether a distinctive group was excluded from jury pools. Whether systematic underrepresentation is present turns on the process of selecting venires, Jackman, supra at 1248, and here questionnaires were sent to a random list of names. The manner in which the venire was selected, then, was random. Defendant's suggestion that more was necessary amounts to a request for extra-constitutional action, and Kent County does not have an obligation under the Sixth Amendment to affirmatively counteract `private sector influences'.... United States v. Purdy, 946 F.Supp. 1094, 1104 (D.Conn., 1996) (holding that a failure to send followup jury questionnaires to persons that did not respond to an initial questionnaire was not a constitutional violation). Relevant to this argument as well is defendant's failure to show that any of the persons that did not respond were black. Defendant's contention that exemptions based on personal reasons were a systematic exclusion of black prospective jurors fails as well. Initially, persons granted exemptions were racially unidentified, so the suggestion that granting personal exemptions resulted in fewer black prospective jurors is, at best, supported by generalized testimony. The exemptions could have resulted in fewer white prospective jurors, fewer black prospective jurors, or no change in the jury pool make-up whatsoever. Further, defendant's suggestion that black prospective jurors would be more likely to request personal exemptions is again attributable to outside social forces rather than systematic exclusion of black prospective jurors, and again Kent County was not required to affirmatively counteract outside forces. Also, exemptions based on personal hardship have been held permissible even when the exempted prospective juror's race was known, and the prospective juror was a member of a distinct group. People v. Howard, 1 Cal.4th 1132, 1160-1161, 5 Cal. Rptr.2d 268, 824 P.2d 1315 (1992) (holding that exemptions for hispanic prospective jurors because of doctor's appointments, loss of income, and difficulty being absent from work were not constitutional violations). Therefore, this argument is also not persuasive. I reiterate that a finding that ... disparities are not unconstitutional is not the same as an endorsement of such discrepancies. United States v. Reyes, 934 F.Supp. 553, 566 (S.D.N.Y., 1996). Defendant's arguments should give pause to anyone who suggests that black Americans have achieved socio-economic parity with white Americans. However, defendant's arguments just do not demonstrate that Kent County's jury selection process systematically excluded black prospective jurors.
Finally, defendant argues that the statistics alone sufficiently show that black prospective jurors were systematically excluded from Kent County jury pools. He contends that the persistent underrepresentation shows that random chance could not have produced such a result. In Rioux, supra, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals confronted a similar claim that statistics alone prove systematic exclusion. That court stated: Without accepting the canard that if you torture the statistics long enough, they'll say anything you want them to, it remains unclear whether statistics alone can prove systematic exclusion. Even if they can, however, they would have to be of an overwhelmingly convincing nature. Id. at 658 (internal citations omitted). Several courts, however, have clearly stated that statistics alone cannot prove systematic exclusion. See United States v. Pion, 25 F.3d 18, 24 (C.A.1, 1994) (holding that an allegation of systematic exclusion based on statistics alone was pure speculation); United States v. Garcia, 991 F.2d 489, 492 (C.A.8, 1993) (holding that numerical underrepresentation is not a proxy for systematic exclusion); Howard, supra at 1160, 5 Cal.Rptr.2d 268, 824 P.2d 1315 (A defendant cannot carry this burden with nothing more than statistical evidence of a disparity. One must, in addition, show that the disparity is the result of an improper feature of the jury selection process). Even presuming that defendant could rely exclusively on statistics, he has not made an adequate showing. In Duren, the Court noted that the defendant proved that a large discrepancy was occurring in every weekly venire for a period of nearly a year. Duren, supra at 366, 99 S.Ct. 664. Here, defendant's proof may satisfy any duration requirement, because there was some underrepresentation in five of the six periods surveyed, but the disparities over that time were nowhere near as large as those in Duren. The absolute disparity in Duren was thirty-nine percent, and the comparative disparity was sixty-five percent. [16] In the instant case, defendant could not make a showing of unfair and unreasonable underrepresentation under any of the disparity analyses. Thus the defendant's statistics are not so overwhelmingly convincing. Without a showing that the disparity was the result of an improper feature, Howard, supra at 1160, 5 Cal.Rptr.2d 268, 824 P.2d 1315, defendant cannot prevail.