Opinion ID: 1244833
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 14

Heading: Exclusion of ADPs

Text: To the best of my knowledge, no empirical data support the proposition, first propounded in Hovey v. Superior Court, 28 Cal.3d 1, 168 Cal.Rptr. 128, 170-71 & n. 110, 616 P.2d 1301, 1343 & n. 110 (1980), and then adopted by this court in Moore, that excluding ADPs from death-qualified juries actually counterbalances the risk that a death-qualified jury will be conviction-prone. Rather, recent analyses suggest that these juries still will be conviction-prone. Empirically, we thus face a different set of facts than we did in Moore. Before discussing the empirical findings, however, I first note my apprehension, based on a review of the jury voir dire in this case, that when empaneling a capital jury, Utah trial courts do not always engage in the proper counterbalancing of excluding ADPs that the Moore opinion assumed they would. The lead opinion cites State v. Schreuder, 726 P.2d 1215, 1225-26 (Utah 1986), to support the proposition that [t]he Utah practice of death qualification excludes not only those jurors who would never vote to impose the death penalty, but also those jurors who would always vote to impose the death penalty upon a finding of first degree murder. Unfortunately, in this case I believe the trial court did not satisfy Schreuder 's requirement that it also ask prospective jurors if they would automatically vote for the death penalty upon a conviction of first degree murder. [13] Id. In questioning the general panel, the trial court did seek to identify WEs, asking for a show of hands from any of you who are so unalterably opposed to the imposition of the death penalty that you could not under any set of circumstances ... return a verdict imposing the death penalty. But when questioning the general panel, the court did not ask the correlative question of whether any of them would automatically vote for death upon conviction. Instead, all questioning designed to identify ADPs came in the sequestered voir dire of each individual juror that followed. Moreover, explicit ADP questioning usually came from defense counsel, [14] not the court. This was so despite both the trial court's obligation to examine all jurors uniformly on their ADP status and its consistent practice of supplementing the WE questioning of the general panel with additional WE questioning in the individual voir dire. [15] Furthermore, to the extent the trial court did engage in ADP questioning in the individual voir dire, its questioning was inconsistent. For example, when questioning juror Cole, the court did not inquire whether Cole would automatically vote for the death penalty upon conviction of first degree murder. When examining juror Bauman, the court did not make this inquiry until it sought to clarify a question posed by defense counsel. The court then said, [The question] is whether or not you would feel that because there had been a homicide, and because it had been intentional, just that alone would make you feel that there must be the death penalty? Of course, intentional homicides may be other than first degree, so even this clarification did not address the proper issue. When questioning juror Petrogeorge, the court explicitly asked, If the facts and law of this case told you that the appropriate penalty to impose was life imprisonment as opposed to the death penalty, ... would you be able to vote for life imprisonment? The court asked juror Radon a similar question. These questions come closer to the required inquiry, although by prefacing the question with a statement of what the facts and law suggest, the court substantially undermined the ability of the question to reveal a juror's potential biases. To empanel a capital jury properly under our Moore and Schreuder standards, I believe that when the trial court poses a question to the general panel designed to identify WEs, the court also should ask the general panel an ADP question. A proper question (perhaps after explaining the intentional, aggravated nature of first degree murder) would be along the following lines: Are there any of you who, because of your beliefs in favor of the death penalty, would always vote to impose capital punishment upon every defendant convicted of an intentional, aggravated murder? More importantly, whether or not the court asks these questions of the general panel, the court should always make this inquiry in the individual voir dire. Furthermore, the court should preface its ADP questions with no more and no less of an explanation of capital sentencing than it uses to preface its WE questions. In this case, I am disturbed both by the trial court's failure to ask an ADP question of the general panel as a counterpoint to its WE question and by its failure to ask a uniform ADP question in the individual voir dire of all jurors. I must conclude that the counterbalancing of excluding ADPs, which we presumed in Schreuder and Moore to be occurring, is not in fact always taking place. Even assuming, however, that the Utah trial courts are properly excluding ADPs from capital juries, the data from several recent studies demonstrate a statistically significant likelihood that death qualification frequently will prejudice juries against the defendant. As one scholar stated, these studies show that when ADPs as well as WEs are excluded, nonetheless, the procedure of death qualification biases the jury pool against the defense. Joseph B. Kadane, After Hovey: A Note on Taking Account of the Automatic Death Penalty Jurors, 8 L. & Hum.Behav. 115, 119 (1984). The federal district court in Grigsby v. Mabry reviewed several ADP studies, concluding that even after excluding ADPs the guilt-proneness of the resulting jury remains. 569 F.Supp. at 1305-08; cf. People v. Middleton, 244 Cal.Rptr. 378, 391 n. 14, 392 (Cal.Ct.App.1988) (describing results of four ADP studies but holding ADP question still open in California). I therefore conclude that we erred when we presumed in Moore that excluding ADPs adequately counterbalanced the apparent conviction-proneness of death-qualified juries. To counter persistent skepticism of these empirical results, I note only that even ignoring these findings, no empirical or intuitive basis exists for concluding that excluding ADPs will resurrect the defendant's right to a jury drawn from a pool that constitutes a representative cross-section of the community. A criminal defendant is entitled to trial by a jury of equals and neighbors, indifferently chosen. Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, 152, 88 S.Ct. 1444, 1449, 20 L.Ed.2d 491 (1968) (quoting 4 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 349-50 (Cooley ed. 1899)); accord Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357, 99 S.Ct. 664, 58 L.Ed.2d 579 (1979). A jury from which ADPs and WEs have been excluded is not indifferently chosen. ADPs and WEs are excluded on the basis of characteristics that bear no relationship to their ability to participate impartially in the trial of a defendant's guilt, and their exclusion compromises the representative quality of the jury. As we said in State v. Ball, excluding all jurors of an identifiable group `upsets the demographic balance of the venire [and] frustrates the primary purpose of the representative cross-section requirement. That purpose... is to achieve an overall impartiality by allowing the interaction of the diverse beliefs and values the jurors bring from their group experiences.' 685 P.2d 1055, 1059 (Utah 1984) (quoting People v. Wheeler, 22 Cal.3d 258, 148 Cal.Rptr. 890, 902-03, 583 P.2d 748, 761 (1978)). I am confident that this court would not uphold the exclusion of all college graduates or all jurors over forty years of age, and yet the lead opinion's decision today continues to exclude all ADP jurors as well as all WE jurors from ever sitting on a capital jury. Therefore, whether or not the empirical data show that excluding ADPs fails to mitigate the risk that the death-qualified jury will be conviction-prone, the practice only further erodes a criminal defendant's right to a representative jury. [16]