Opinion ID: 379224
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Prejudicial Pretrial Publicity

Text: 9 One seeking to have his conviction nullified on the ground that he was denied a fair trial to an impartial jury due to adverse pretrial publicity ordinarily must demonstrate an actual, identifiable prejudice attributable to that publicity on the part of members of his jury. Irvin v. Dowd, 366 U.S. 717, 723, 81 S.Ct. 1639, 1642, 6 L.Ed. 751 (1961); United States v. Capo, 595 F.2d 1086, 1090 (5th Cir. 1979) cert. denied, 444 U.S. 1012, 100 S.Ct. 660, 62 L.Ed. 641 (1980); Hale v. United States, 435 F.2d 737, 746-47 (5th Cir. 1970) cert. denied, 402 U.S. 976, 91 S.Ct. 1680, 29 L.Ed.2d 142 (1971). Barring the introduction of affidavits or testimony of jurors admitting bias, proof of such prejudice without recourse to a transcript or other detailed account of the voir dire of the jury venire would be virtually impossible. United States v. Haldeman, 559 F.2d 31, 60 (D.C.Cir. 1976) cert. denied, 431 U.S. 933, 97 S.Ct. 2641, 53 L.Ed.2d 250 (1977). Consequently, because of the absence of such a detailed account in this case, Mayola has never attempted to pursue this conventional approach of showing actual prejudice. 10 Rather, he seeks to invoke the rule announced in Rideau v. Louisiana, 373 U.S. 723, 83 S.Ct. 1417, 10 L.Ed.2d 663 (1963). In Rideau the Supreme Court, without pausing to examine a particularized transcript of the voir dire examination of members of the jury, id. at 727, 83 S.Ct. 1417, 1419-20, overturned the conviction of a habeas petitioner whose uncounselled confession had been filmed, recorded, and then telecast three times by the local television station to large audiences in the Louisiana parish from which the jury was drawn and in which he was tried less than two months later. The principle distilled from this holding by courts subsequently discussing the case is that where a petitioner adduces evidence of inflammatory, prejudicial pretrial publicity that so pervades or saturates the community as to render virtually impossible a fair trial by an impartial jury drawn from that community, (jury) prejudice is presumed and there is no further duty to establish bias. United States v. Capo, 595 F.2d at 1090. E. g., Murphy v. Florida, 421 U.S. 794, 798-99, 95 S.Ct. 2031, 2035-2036, 44 L.Ed.2d 589 (1975); United States v. Haldeman, 559 F.2d at 60-61; McWilliams v. United States, 394 F.2d 41, 44 (8th Cir. 1968), cert. denied, 393 U.S. 1044, 89 S.Ct. 643, 21 L.Ed.2d 593 (1969); Pamplin v. Mason, 364 F.2d 1, 4-5 (5th Cir. 1966). See also, e. g., Jenkins v. Bordenkircher, 611 F.2d 162, 165 (6th Cir. 1979) (reciting equivalent standard without referring to Rideau itself). These courts have held that where the Rideau principle applies, the petitioner clearly need not show that the pervasive community prejudice actually entered the jury box, Pamplin v. Mason, 364 F.2d at 5, and some circuits have indicated that the petitioner need not even demonstrate that the members of the jury panel or venire were, themselves, actually exposed to the publicity, e. g. McWilliams v. United States, 394 F.2d at 44. 11 Given that virtually every case of any consequence will be the subject of some press attention, however, the Rideau principle of presumptive prejudice is only rarely applicable, Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart, 427 U.S. 539, 554, 96 S.Ct. 2791, 2800 (1976), and is confined to those instances where the petitioner can demonstrate an extreme situation of inflammatory pretrial publicity that literally saturated the community in which his trial was held. Hale v. United States, 435 F.2d at 747. That it is a rigorous path upon which Mayola has embarked is best illustrated by the fact that only in Rideau, itself, has the Supreme Court reversed a state court conviction on this basis of presumed prejudice deriving solely from pretrial publicity. United States v. Haldeman, 559 F.2d at 60, 61 n.32. 4 Indeed, though many courts have recited its principle in dictum and by way of distinction from the cases before them, we have been pointed to only one instance since Rideau in which even a circuit court has actually implemented Rideau to grant habeas corpus to a state prisoner, Pamplin v. Mason, 364 F.2d at 6-7. 12 Unlike the situation in most cases where presumptive prejudice has been argued, however, Mayola has adduced evidence of newspaper coverage by the Birmingham News and Post-Herald that at least approximates in the level of its prejudicial nature the dramatic spectacle of Rideau's televised confession. In fact, both the News and Post-Herald reported detailed accounts of confessions given by Mayola, as well as of other inculpatory statements attributed to him. While these newspaper accounts probably did not have the impact of a televised confession, their effect was compounded by the publication of additional, highly prejudicial matter, such as the News' erroneous reports that a state toxicologist's examination had shown the boy to have been sexually assaulted and that his body had been mutilated, and recurring references by both papers to Mayola's prior conviction for sodomy and to other unfavorable or inculpatory facts similarly inadmissible at trial. The effect of such reports frequently was enhanced and their authority and credibility bolstered by their attribution of numerous details to official sources, such as the sheriff's department, that apparently had freely supplied these condemnatory items to the press. The entirety of the coverage was, of course, permeated with exploitative allusions to petitioner's alleged sexual perversion. 13 Nevertheless, although this publicity certainly was prejudicial and may very well have been sufficiently so as to have satisfied Rideau and its gloss on this point Mayola has failed to prove that the prejudicial newspaper coverage so saturated and tainted the Blount County populace that any subsequent proceeding in that county would have been unavoidably poisoned by it. Unlike the petitioner in Rideau, who adduced evidence that his televised confession had been seen by tens of thousands of citizens in the Louisiana parish of 150,000 from which the jury had been drawn, as well as by three of the jurors who actually heard his case, Mayola produced no Blount County newspaper circulation figures 5 or any other evidence of the scope of that county's exposure to the offensive News and Post-Herald articles. 6 United States v. Ricardo, 619 F.2d 1124, 1131, 1132 (5th Cir. 1980) (failure to adduce newspaper circulation statistics instrumental in court's rejection of appellant's pretrial publicity claims). In the absence of such proof, petitioner could hardly have demonstrated the pervasiveness or saturation level of prejudicial publicity necessary to invoke the Rideau presumption. 14 While it may be conceded that this rather spectacular case and its participants achieved a significant degree of notoriety in this small Alabama community, such notoriety alone does not excuse the need for circulation figures or other evidence of the degree of community exposure to the prejudicial content of the offensive news coverage. As the Supreme Court and lower courts have continually reiterated, the constitutional standard of fairness requires only that the accused have a panel of impartial, 'indifferent' jurors, who base their decision solely on the evidence produced in court; it does not require jurors to be wholly ignorant of the case. E. g., Murphy v. Florida, 421 U.S. at 799-800, 95 S.Ct. at 2035-2036, quoting Irvin v. Dowd, 366 U.S. at 722-23, 81 S.Ct. at 1642-1643; United States v. Williams, 568 F.2d 464, 467-68 (5th Cir. 1978). Thus, broad and intensive public awareness was held not to have triggered Rideau or to have deprived defendants of fair trials growing out of two of the most notorious events of this nation's recent past, the battlefield execution of Vietnamese civilians by Lt. William Calley, Jr., and other soldiers, Calley v. Callaway, 519 F.2d 184, 203-13 (5th Cir. 1975) cert. denied, 425 U.S. 911, 96 S.Ct. 1505, 47 L.Ed.2d 760 (1976), and the high level conspiracy to cover up the Watergate break-in, United States v. Haldeman, 559 F.2d at 60-69. 15 To satisfy his burden even in such sensational cases, the petitioner must, therefore, demonstrate that the populace from which his jury was drawn was widely infected by a prejudice apart from mere familiarity with the case. Where, as here, the petitioner relies solely upon the inflammatory details and tenor of particular newspaper articles as the seeds of that prejudice, he must evince some indication of the ambit of the dissemination of this poisonous palaver. Without such, no measure of the taint alleged to have derived from it can be deduced, and certainly the pervasive prejudice required to trigger Rideau will not have been proved. 16 Accordingly, due to petitioner's failure to adduce any evidence of the scope of the exposure of the Blount County population to the offensive news coverage on which he relies, we hold that he has not shown the pervasive community prejudice required to trigger the Rideau presumption. Such pervasive prejudice may not be presumed simply from the content of the articles alone. See Bassett v. Dutton, 402 F.2d 263 (5th Cir. 1968) (declining to overturn conviction despite alleged massive pervasive, and prejudicial publicity solely on the basis of the articles in question, without proof of the degree of their influence, if any). Thus, since petitioner attempted to prove no actual prejudice, the district court correctly denied his petition for habeas corpus.