Opinion ID: 776195
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Power of Congress Under Section Two of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Text: 59 The existence of the Amendment's second section, however, renders consideration of the independent scope of Section One unnecessary. 17 As the following discussion explains, Section Two grants Congress the power to enforce the Amendment by appropriate legislation, and it is clear from many decisions of the Supreme Court that Congress may, under its Section Two enforcement power, now reach conduct that is not directly prohibited under Section One. Furthermore, § 245(b)(2)(B), as applied in the case before us, falls comfortably within the limits of Congress's broad powers of enforcement under Section Two as these have been defined by controlling precedent. 60 The enforcement power granted Congress by Section Two has not always been construed in the broad manner described above. See Risa L. Goluboff, The Thirteenth Amendment and the Lost Origins of Civil Rights, 50 Duke L.J. 1609, 1639 (2001). Thus, even though the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases interpreted the Thirteenth Amendment to authorize Congress to abolish not only chattel slavery itself but also to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery, Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. at 20, it simultaneously suggested that the concept of badges and incidents of slavery might have a narrow construction. In particular, the Court held that the Congress's power to abolish the badges and incidents of slavery was limited to secur[ing] to all citizens of every race and color... those fundamental rights which are the essence of civil freedom, namely, the same right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, and convey property, as is enjoyed by white citizens. Id. at 22. At the same time, the Court stated that the Thirteenth Amendment did not give Congress the power to adjust what may be called the social rights of men and races in the community. Id. And it found that the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited the denial of public accommodations based on race, ha[d] nothing to do with slavery or involuntary servitude, and hence could not be sustained as constitutional under the Thirteenth Amendment. Id. at 24. To adopt a more general interpretation of Congress's powers under Section Two, the Supreme Court concluded, would be running the slavery argument into the ground. Id. 61 Moreover, regardless of whether this narrow reading was required to decide the Civil Rights Cases, it was expressly adopted roughly twenty years later, in Hodges v. United States, 203 U.S. 1 (1906), when the Supreme Court reversed the convictions (under predecessors to 18 U.S.C. § 241 and 42 U.S.C. §1981) of white men who had conspired to terrorize a group of black men to prevent them from working at a sawmill. In reaching this conclusion, the Court argued that it was not the intent of the [Thirteenth] Amendment to denounce every act done to an individual which was wrong if done to a free man, and yet justified in a condition of slavery. Hodges, 203 U.S. at 19. And it added that no mere personal assault or trespass or appropriation operates to reduce the individual to a condition of slavery as prohibited by the Amendment. Id. at 18. Finally, the Hodges Court couched these arguments in terms that narrowed Congress's Section Two power quite generally, concluding, in effect, that the Thirteenth Amendment authorizes Congress to proscribe only private acts that actually enslave a person, that is, that create a state of entire subjection of one person to the will of another. Id. at 7 (internal quotations omitted). 62 Both of these interpretations of the Thirteenth Amendment were adopted over ringing dissents by Justice Harlan (joined, in Hodges, by Justice Day). Justice Harlan argued that under the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress acquired the power not only to legislate for the eradication of slavery, but the power to give full effect to this bestowment of liberty. Id. at 29 (Harlan, J., dissenting). Consequently, Justice Harlan concluded, Congress enjoyed the power to pass all laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution this power, id. at 25-26 (Harlan, J., dissenting), including laws to make it impossible that any of [slavery's] incidents or badges should exist or be enforced in any State or Territory of the United States. Id. at 27 (Harlan, J.,dissenting). Moreover, and most critically, Justice Harlan asserted that [t]he form and manner of the protection [against slavery and involuntary servitude] may be such as Congress, in the legitimate exercise of its legislative discretion, shall provide. Id. at 24 (Harlan, J., dissenting) (quotation marks omitted). 63 Although Justice Harlan's view of the Amendment has not been adopted in every particular, see supra footnote 16, the narrow construction of congressional power under Section Two -- epitomized by Hodges -- was expressly overruled. See Jones, 392 U.S. at 441 n.78. And Justice Harlan's reading of the Thirteenth Amendment's enforcement clause, including, critically, his account of the scope of congressional discretion under that clause, has in principal part prevailed. 64 The Supreme Court overruled Hodges and established this broader account of the enforcement power in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409 (1968). 18 Jones involved a plaintiff who sought relief under 42 U.S.C. § 1982 against defendants who had refused to sell him a house for the sole reason that he was black. The Supreme Court held that, as a matter of statutory construction, § 1982 bars all racial discrimination, private as well as public, in the sale or rental of property, and that the statute, thus construed, is a valid exercise of the power of Congress [under Section Two] to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment. Id. at 413. Furthermore, the Court found that the authority of Congress to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment include[s] the power to eliminate all racial barriers to the acquisition of real and personal property. Id. at 439. Critically, the Court reached this conclusion while insisting that it need not decide the scope of the direct prohibitions contained in Section One of the Thirteenth Amendment because Section Two clothed `Congress with power to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery in the United States.' Id. at 439 (quoting Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. at 20). 19 And most significantly, the Court noted, [s]urely Congress has the power under the Thirteenth Amendment rationally to determine what are the badges and the incidents of slavery, and the authority to translate that determination into effective legislation. Jones, 392 U.S. at 440. Finally, the Court expressly stated that, to the extent it was inconsistent with these pronouncements, Hodges was overruled. Id. at 443 n.78. 65 Subsequently, in Griffin v. Breckenridge, 403 U.S. 88 (1971), the Supreme Court expanded on the theme introduced in Jones. The Court upheld, under the Thirteenth Amendment, the constitutionality of 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3), which creates a federal cause of action for damages when two or more persons... conspire or go in disguise on the highway or on the premises of another, for the purpose of depriving... any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws, or of equal privileges and immunities under the laws... [and]... do... any act in furtherance of the object of such conspiracy whereby another is injured... or deprived of... any right or privilege of a citizen of the United States. 66 In upholding the statute -- as applied to defendants who had conspired to assault and had, in fact, assaulted a group of blacks who were driving through Mississippi, and who the defendants (mistakenly) believed were involved with civil rights activists - the Supreme Court stated that the varieties of private conduct that [Congress] may make criminally punishable or civilly remediable [under Section Two of the Thirteenth Amendment] extend far beyond the actual imposition of slavery or involuntary servitude. Griffin, 403 U.S. at 105. Indeed, the Court expressed complete confidence both in this principle and in the fact that the principle covered the facts of the case before it, saying that [w]e can only conclude that Congress was wholly within its powers under § 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment in creating a statutory cause of action for Negro citizens who have been the victims of conspiratorial, racially discriminatory private action aimed at depriving them of the basic rights that the law secures to all free men. Id. Thereafter, the Supreme Court has applied this account of Congress's enforcement power under Section Two of the Thirteenth Amendment to uphold 42 U.S.C. § 1981 and that statute's creation of a federal civil remedy for racial discrimination in making and enforcing contracts in the context of private employment, see Johnson v. Ry. Express Agency, Inc., 421 U.S. 454, 459-60 (1975), and private education, see Runyon, 427 U.S. at 173-75, 179. 67 It seems to us that this set of cases necessarily depends on the notion that Congress has been vested, by Section Two of the Thirteenth Amendment, with the authority to prohibit conduct that the courts are unable to say violates Section One directly. This theme is well (if indirectly) developed in two Supreme Court cases declining to invalidate local government actions under Section One of the Thirteenth Amendment but expressly suggesting that if Congress had enacted statutes prohibiting the challenged conduct pursuant to Section Two of the Amendment, then the prohibitions, which the Court was itself unwilling to impose, would have been upheld. Thus, in Palmer v. Thompson, 403 U.S. 217, 227 (1971), the Supreme Court declared itself unwilling to hold that the City of Jackson's decision to close a municipal swimming pool rather than desegregate it violated the Thirteenth Amendment, but noted that although the Thirteenth Amendment is a skimpy collection of words to allow this Court to legislate new laws to control the operation of swimming pools throughout the length and breadth of this Nation, the Amendment does contain other words that... could empower Congress to outlaw `badges of slavery.' The Court, after quoting Section Two, noted that Congress has passed no law under this power to regulate a city's opening or closing of swimming pools. Id. And in City of Memphis v. Greene, 451 U.S. 100, 128 (1981), the Court -- even as it declined to hold that the closing of a city street (that began in a predominantly black neighborhood and traversed a predominantly white one) in and of itself contravened the Thirteenth Amendment -- added, by way of explanation and contrast, that the case did not disclose a violation of any of the enabling legislation enacted by Congress pursuant to § 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment. 68 The difference between the Court's articulate unwillingness, in Palmer and Greene, to apply Section One of the Thirteenth Amendment where Congress had not acted under Section Two and its equally articulate willingness, in Jones, Griffin, Johnson, and Runyon, to affirm Congress's choices when it had acted under the latter section, serves to underscore the extent to which Congress's powers under Section Two of the Thirteenth Amendment extend beyond the prohibition on actual slavery and servitude expressed in Section One. And, as we have shown, Congress, through its enforcement power under Section Two of the Thirteenth Amendment is empowered, to control conduct that does not come close to violating Section One directly. 20 The question before us is whether, in light of this jurisprudence, § 245(b)(2)(B), as applied in the case at bar, lies within this expansive enforcement power. We must, in other words, ask whether Congress could rationally have determined that the acts of violence covered by § 245(b)(2)(B) impose a badge or incident of servitude on their victims. 69 C. The Meaning and Significance Under the Thirteenth Amendment of the Language of Section 245(b)(2)(B). 70 The critical feature of § 245(b)(2)(B) for purposes of this constitutional analysis is that it does not seek to reach most force-based injuries, intimidations, or interferences and by no means attempts to create a general, undifferentiated federal law of criminal assault. In this regard, the Supreme Court's treatment of § 1985(3) in Griffin provides a striking analogue. In Griffin, the Court said: The constitutional shoals that would lie in the path of interpreting § 1985(3) as a general federal tort law can be avoided by giving full effect to the congressional purpose -- by requiring, as an element of the cause of action, the kind of invidiously discriminatory motivation stressed by the sponsors of [a] limiting amendment [and included in the statute]. Griffin, 403 U.S. at 102. Likewise, in the case at bar, similar constitutional shoals can be avoided by giving full effect to the congressional purpose behind § 245(b)(2)(B) -- by requiring, in other words, as elements of the crime defined by § 245(b)(2)(B) that the forceful injury, intimidation, or interference that the statute addresses be committed because of the victim's race or religion, etc., and because the victim was participating in or enjoying a facility, etc., provided or administered by a State or a subdivision thereof. See 18 U.S.C. § 245(b)(2)(B). Just as the element of invidiously discriminatory motivation was held in Griffin to bring § 1985(3) within the scope of Congress's Thirteenth Amendment powers, so also do the requirements that the victim be harmed because of his or her race or religion and his or her use of public-facilities bring § 245(b)(2)(B) under the same constitutional authority. In each case, the additional elements allow Congress rationally to determine, Jones, 392 U.S. at 440, that the proscribed conduct imposes a badge or incident of slavery on its victims. 71 Since these additional elements of the statute are essential to its constitutionality, we must with particular assiduousness embark on an exercise of statutory interpretation to determine their meaning in § 245(b)(2)(B). 72 The starting point in every case involving construction of a statute is the language itself. Blue Chip Stamps v. Manor Drug Stores, 421 U.S. 723, 756 (1975) (Powell, J., concurring). Accordingly, [w]hen confronted with a statute which is plain and unambiguous on its face, [a court] ordinarily do[es] not look to legislative history as a guide to its meaning. Tenn. Valley Auth. v. Hill, 437 U.S. 153, 185 n.29 (1978) (citing Ex parte Collett, 337 U.S. 55, 61 (1949)). The meaning of § 245(b)(2)(B), however, is anything but unambiguous. 73 Specifically, the significance of the word because, as that word is used in defining the two aforementioned constitutionally crucial elements of the crime, is anything but plain. Causation is one of the most famously complicated concepts in language and in law. The ancient Greeks, for example, distinguished among four concepts all now covered by the modern English word cause. See Aristotle, The Metaphysics 983a-983b (distinguishing among the final, formal, material, and efficient causation). And the modern law of torts employs at least three concepts of cause: cause-in-fact or but for cause, proximate or legal cause, see Restatement (Third) of Torts, § 431 cmt. a (distinguishing these two), and causal link or causal tendency. See Liriano v. Hobart Corp., 170 F.3d 264, 271-72 (2d Cir. 1999) (emphasizing the significance of the last); Zuchowicz v. United States, 140 F.3d 381, 388 n.7 (2d Cir. 1998) (same); see also Guido Calabresi, Concerning Cause and the Law of Torts: An Essay for Harry Kalven, Jr., 43 Univ. of Chi. L. Rev. 69, 71 (1975) (identifying and differentiating these three causal concepts). Moreover, because appears in § 245(b)(2)(B) nakedly, without any larger statutory structure by reference to which its meaning may be assessed. For all these reasons, the face of the Act is inescapably ambiguous, Schwegmann Bros. v. Calvert Distillers Corp., 341 U.S. 384, 395 (1951) (Jackson, J., concurring), and we must, albeit hesitantly, look to the legislative history of § 245(b)(2)(B) to help us establish Congress's intent and hence the statute's meaning. 74 In making this inquiry, we rely principally on the reports of the legislative Committees involved in drafting the statute and in steering it through Congress. The Supreme Court has said that these Reports, which represent the considered and collective understanding of those Congressmen involved in drafting and studying proposed legislation, constitute the authoritative source for finding the Legislature's intent. Garcia v. United States, 469 U.S. 70, 76 (1984) (internal quotation marks and brackets omitted). We therefore eschew[] reliance on the passing comments of one Member, and casual statements from the floor debates, id. (internal citations omitted), and focus on the Reports instead. In particular, we focus on that of the Senate Judiciary Committee, S. Rep. No. 90-721, since this is the only Committee to have considered and commented on the statute in a form that included both of the two becauses at issue here. 75 The Senate Judiciary Committee Report, after noting in passing that the first because entails that an act will come under the statute only if it is motivated by the race, color, religion, or national origin of the victim, S. Rep. No. 90-721, at 7 (1968), reprinted in 1986 U.S.C.C.A.N. 1837, 1844 (emphasis added), focuses more carefully on the meaning of the second because that appears in § 245(b)(2)(B). This because establishes that in order to violate the statute a person, in addition to being motivated by his victim's race, etc., must act because the victim was availing herself of, in the case of § 245(b)(2)(B), publicly provided facilities. 76 In discussing this phrase, the Senate Committee began by noting that the version of the statute originally reported out by the House Judiciary Committee covered acts committed against a person because of her race, etc., and done while the person was using public facilities. Id. The Senate Committee noted that the second because entered the statute as an amendment proposed on the House floor. Id. The original version, the Senate Committee said, may have swept too broadly for the constitutional basis [of] the bill, and the Committee therefore retained the second because that had been added to the bill by the House floor amendment. Id. 77 These background facts and Committee remarks establish that the Congress inserted the second because with the specific purpose of narrowing § 245(b)(2)(B)'s reach. But they do not reveal whether Congress, by this second because, intended § 245(b)(2)(B) to reach all acts which would not have been committed but for the fact that the victim was enjoying a public facility, only the narrower class of acts which were committed with the intent to prevent or dissuade the victim from, or punish the victim for, enjoying a public facility, or-narrower still-acts committed with the motive of preventing, dissuading, or punishing the victim's use of a public facility. 78 Under the first interpretation, a racially motivated assault, for example, would be covered by the statute if the attacker sought out his victims exclusively in a public park (but not if the attacker followed a victim from her house and attacked her while she was in the park only because this happened to be where the first opportunity to assault her arose). Under the second and third interpretations, by contrast, an attack would not come under the statute even if the attacker only assaulted victims in the public park, unless the focus on victims who used the park was more than just a matter of convenience. To be covered, the victims' public-park-use would itself have to be an intrinsic element of the attacker's intent or motivation, a reason, that is, for the assault. The most obvious examples of racially, etc., motivated attacks that implicate these latter senses of because the victims used public facilities are assaults that punish a member of a minority group for using the facilities or, relatedly, discourage that person from doing so in the future. 79 While the familiarity of racially or religiously (etc.) motivated violence allowed the Senate Judiciary Committee to assume in passing that because of race, or religion, etc., as it appears in § 245(b)(2)(B), means motivated by racial or religious, etc., hatred, 21 the somewhat lesser familiarity of the subtypes of violence identified by the second because required more detailed treatment in Committee. And although the Committee Report does not reveal that the Senate expressly focused upon the difference between the three senses of the phrase because [the victim] is or has been... enjoying any... facility... provided... by any State, 18 U.S.C. § 245(b)(2)(B), the Report does demonstrate that the Senate wished to use because in the second, narrower, meaning, but not in the third, narrowest, sense. The Senate Committee, after noting that [i]n the House Committee's version [which read while] it was not necessary to show that the defendant intended to interfere with the protected activity, but only that the use of force was racially motivated, concluded that [t]he problem is avoided by the amendment [adding the second because] which adds the additional element of intent -- a purpose to interfere with the activity. S. Rep. No. 90-721, at 7, reprinted in 1968 U.S.C.C.A.N. at 1844. Indeed, the Senate Committee expressly mentioned precisely the two core cases that we identified as satisfying this stricter interpretation of the second because: 80 Two types of situations would be covered [by the statute]: interference intended to prevent present or future participation in a described activity by the victim, and interference intended as a reprisal against the victim for having participated in a described activity. 81 Id. 22 And, significantly, the Senate Report requires intent with respect to these situations rather than motivation. 23 82 Section 245(b)(2)(B), properly understood, therefore stops well short of creating a general, undifferentiated federal law of criminal assault and instead restricts its attention to acts of force or threat of force that involve two distinct kinds of discriminatory relationships with the victim -- first, an animus against the victim on account of her race, religion, etc., that is, her membership in the categories the statute protects; and, second, an intent to act against the victim on account of her using public facilities, etc., that is, because she was engaging in an activity the statute protects. 24 83 It is important to understand that acts of violence or force committed against members of a hated class of people with the intent to exact retribution for and create dissuasion against their use of public facilities have a long and intimate historical association with slavery and its cognate institutions. Thus there is widespread agreement among scholars of slavery that slavery in general (across cultural and historical periods) centrally involves the master's constant power to use private violence against the slave, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study 1-14 (1982) (noting that such violence is one of the three constituent elements of slavery), and that slavery is preeminently a relationship of power and dominion originating in and sustained by violence. David Brian Davis, Slavery and Human Progress 11 (1984). Moreover, the peculiar institution of American slavery unquestionably did not depart from this general rule. Southern States, for example, decriminalized [private] violence inflicted upon blacks to the extent thought necessary to assert and preserve white supremacy. Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime and the Law 30 (1997). And, in several States legislators expressly deprived slaves who were violently abused by whites of the protections of the common law of crimes by passing exculpatory acts that granted both slave masters and whites who were strangers to the slave legal rights to beat, whip, and kill bondsmen. Andrew Fede, Legitimized Violent Slave Abuse in the American South, 1619-1865: A Case Study of Law and Social Change in Six Southern States, 29 Am. J. Legal Hist. 93, 95 (1985). 84 Significantly, this practice of race-based private violence both continued beyond the demise of the institution of chattel slavery and was closely connected to the prevention of former slaves' exercise of their newly obtained civil and other rights (rights that slavery had previously denied them), thereby presenting a spectacle of slavery unwilling to die. Jones, 392 U.S. at 445 (Douglas, J., concurring). Thus violence against blacks reached staggering proportions in the immediate aftermath of the [Civil War], Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877, at 119 (1988), and such violence was specifically directed at the exercise, by black Americans, of the rights and habits of free persons. See, e.g., id. at 120 (The pervasiveness of violence reflected whites' determination to define in their own way the meaning of freedom and their determined resistance to blacks' efforts to establish their autonomy, whether in matters of family, church, labor, or personal demeanor.); Kennedy, supra, at 39 (In an effort to reassert control, whites beat or killed African-Americans for such `infractions' as failing to step off sidewalks, objecting to beatings of their children, addressing whites without deference, and attempting to vote.). 85 As these studies suggest, there exist indubitable connections (a) between slavery and private violence directed against despised and enslaved groups and, more specifically, (b) between American slavery and private violence and (c) between post Civil War efforts to return freed slaves to a subjugated status and private violence directed at interfering with and discouraging the freed slaves' exercise of civil rights in public places. It is in the shadow of these connections, and citing to Justice Douglas's characterization of slavery as unwilling to die, Jones, 392 U.S. at 445 (Douglas, J., concurring), that the Eighth Circuit (the only Circuit previously to address the question of § 245(b)(2)(B)'s constitutionality under the Thirteenth Amendment), concluded [n]or can there be doubt that interfering with a person's use of a public [facility] because he is black is a badge of slavery. United States v. Bledsoe, 728 F.2d 1094, 1097 (8th Cir. 1984). 86 On the basis of the foregoing analysis, we similarly conclude that § 245(b)(2)(B)'s prohibition against private violence motivated by the victim's race, religion, etc., and because of the victim's use of a public facility, etc., 25 falls comfortably within Congress's power under the Thirteenth Amendment rationally to determine what are the badges and the incidents of slavery, and [its] authority to translate that determination into effective legislation. Jones, 392 U.S. at 440. 26 Accordingly, we find that § 245(b)(2)(B), as applied in the case at bar, 27 is a constitutional exercise of Congress's power under the Thirteenth Amendment. 28 87 2. The Scope of 18 U.S.C. § 245(b)(2)(B). 88 The defendants argue, next, that even if § 245(b)(2)(B) is constitutional, it does not reach the conduct for which they were tried and convicted. 89 A. Streets as Public Facilities. 90 Section 245(b)(2)(B) limits its scope to acts committed against victims because they are participating in or enjoying any benefit, service, privilege, program, facility or activity provided or administered by any State or subdivision thereof. The defendants contend that their conduct does not come under the statute because Rosenbaum was not participating in or enjoying any benefit, service, privilege, program, facility or activity when he was attacked. In particular, the defendants argue that the Brooklyn city street on which Rosenbaum was attacked does not count as a facility within the meaning of § 245(b)(2)(B). 29 91 The defendants begin with the proposition that facility as used in § 245(b)(2)(B) is an ambiguous term, so that we must, in deciding the statute's meaning, look beyond statutory language. See Schwegmann Bros., 341 U.S. at 395 (Jackson, J., concurring). Proceeding from this premise, they contend that in light of the legislative history of the statute and also of the rule of lenity (which asserts that ambiguities in criminal statutes should be resolved in a defendant's favor), see Kozminski, 487 U.S. at 952, we should find that a city street is not a facility for purposes of § 245(b)(2)(B). As a result, the defendants urge us to conclude that the fact that Rosenbaum was using a city street when the defendants attacked him is insufficient to sustain their convictions under the statute. 30 92 This argument need not detain us long, for it stumbles at its initial premise. As the defendants themselves concede, [t]he starting point in interpreting a statute is its language, for `[i]f the intent of Congress is clear, that is the end of the matter.' Good Samaritan Hosp. v. Shalala, 508 U.S. 402, 409 (1993) (citing Chevron USA, Inc. v. Natural Res. Def. Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837, 842 (1984)). Therefore, if § 245(b)(2)(B) is not ambiguous on its face, the defendants' remaining contentions fall away. 31 93 Defendants' suggestions to the contrary notwithstanding, the term facility clearly and unambiguously includes city streets within its meaning. A facility is something that promotes the ease of any action, operation, transaction, or course of conduct or something (as a hospital, machinery, plumbing) that is built, constructed, installed or established to perform some particular function or facilitate some particular end. Webster's Third International Dictionary 812-13 (1966). And a city street undoubtedly promotes the ease of travel and transportation within the city and is built and constructed to perform [the] function [and] facilitate [the] end of such travel and transportation. It therefore unambiguously falls within the clear meaning of the text of § 245(b)(2)(B). Accordingly, as the district court correctly held, President Street in Brooklyn qualifies as a facility for purposes of § 245(b)(2)(B). 32 94 B. The Defendants' Motive and Intent. 95 In assessing the constitutionality of § 245(b)(2)(B), we held that this statute restricts its scope to acts of force or threat of force that involve two distinct kinds of discriminatory attitudes with respect to the victim -- first, a motive or an animus against the victim on account of her race, religion, etc., that is, her membership in a class or category the statute protects; and, second, an intent to act against the victim on account of his or her using public facilities, etc., that is, of his or her engaging in an activity that the statute protects. 33 96 In this appeal, the defendants attack the application of these motivation and intent requirements to them on formal and substantive grounds. The formal challenge is that the district court in its charge to the jury combined the two requirements. The substantive challenge is that the evidence was insufficient with respect to the second. The defendants claim that there is no evidence of any motive or intent to impose punishment or dissuasion on Rosenbaum because of his enjoying a city street, i.e., because of his engaging in the statutorily protected activity. 34 We consider each argument in turn. 97 (a) The Formal Challenge. 98 In its jury instructions, the trial court, over the defendants' objection, presented the dual requirements of motivation and intent imposed by § 245(b)(2)(B) as a single element of the crime that the statute creates. The court charged that the government must prove that the defendants injured, intimidated or interfered with Yankel Rosenbaum because he was Jewish and because he was exercising his right to use the streets. (Tr. 3024 (emphasis added)). In their formal challenge, the defendants renew their objection to this charge and argue that by combining the two requirements into a single element, rather than instructing the jury that each constituted a separate and distinct element, the district court minimized the government's obligation to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendants displayed both. 99 This argument is straightforwardly meritless. In its instructions to the jury, the district court expressly and repeatedly used the conjunctive and in referring to the statutory requirement that both class-based motivation and activities-based intent are required to sustain a conviction under § 245(b)(2)(B). Furthermore the court, in describing to the jury the statute's requirements, referred, in the plural, to these motives or reasons, and presented the jury with an explicit and separate discussion of the second, activities-based intent requirement. (Tr. 3024). A conjunctive predicate is true only if both of its constituent predicates are true. And the proof requirements imposed on the government are not altered merely because the conjunction joins two predicates within one element of a charged crime rather than joining two separate, one-predicate elements. The district court made the need to establish the existence of both of these § 245(b)(2)(B) requirements plain. The defendants' formal argument that the district court's combining the two requirements into a single element of the crime was erroneous therefore fails. 35 100 (b) The Substantive Challenge. 101 The defendants' substantive argument concerning the activities-based because requirement presents a more serious question. The defendants may be contending, in this connection, that the evidence presented at trial was inadequate to establish that they possessed an activities-based motive which they may be saying is needed to sustain a conviction under § 245(b)(2)(B). They could be claiming that there was no evidence presented at trial sufficient to allow a jury to conclude that they acted with animus against Rosenbaum on account of his using the public street on which he was attacked or that they intended to punish or dissuade Rosenbaum from using a city street. 36 If this is their argument, they overstate the statute's requirements. As we have interpreted § 245(b)(2)(B), see supra, it mandates an intent to interfere with the victim's use of public facilities, but does not demand a specific motive to do so. Accordingly, we will read defendants' challenge as principally one to the sufficiency of the evidence of the requisite intent. 102 A defendant challenging the sufficiency of the evidence bears a heavy burden. United States v. Pipola, 83 F.3d 556, 564 (2d Cir. 1996). In addressing such a challenge, we must consider the evidence in the light most favorable to the government. United States v. Gore, 154 F.3d 34, 40 (2d Cir. 1998) (quotation marks omitted). And we must credit every inference that could have been drawn in the government's favor. United States v. Masotto, 73 F.3d 1233, 1241 (2d Cir. 1996) (quotation marks omitted). Accordingly, [t]he jury's verdict must be sustained, `if any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.' Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 319, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979). Gore, 154 F.3d at 40. Finally, [t]hese principles apply whether the evidence being received is direct or circumstantial. Id. 103 Whereas overwhelming direct evidence was adduced to prove that the defendants displayed anti-Jewish animus of the sort contemplated by § 245(b)(2)(B), the trial produced no similar direct evidence that the defendants, in addition to being motivated by Rosenbaum's Judaism, also had an intent to prevent or dissuade his use of the city street. For this reason, the case at bar is distinguishable from some (but not all, see infra) other cases in which convictions under § 245 have been upheld against sufficiency challenges. Thus the defendants' sufficiency challenges in this case raise more difficult questions than those made and rejected in United States v. Franklin, 704 F.2d 1183, 1192 (10th Cir. 1983), and United States v. Lane, 883 F.2d 1484, 1496 (10th Cir. 1989). In both of these cases, which involved §§ 245(b)(2)(B) and (C), there was direct evidence that the defendants had, prior to committing their crimes, specifically objected, in one, to racial mixing at the park in which the crime was committed (Franklin) and, in the other, to a Jewish victim's employment as a radio talk show host (Lane). 104 In contrast to the evidence in Franklin and Lane, the only evidence on which the government can rely in the case at bar is the circumstantial evidence that the defendants and the mob they incited or belonged to sought out their victims exclusively on city streets, and that the natural and foreseeable consequence of the attacks, given the victims' locations, was both an interference with these victims' contemporaneous use of the streets and an intimidation and deterrence against their future use of such streets. Against this evidentiary backdrop, and immediately after repeating its instruction that § 245(b)(2)(B) required the jury to decide whether the defendants acted both because of Rosenbaum's Judaism and because of his use of the city streets, the district court instructed the jury that in order to find that § 245(b)(2)(B)'s because requirements were satisfied the jury needed to make 105 a decision about the defendants' state of mind. It is often impossible to ascertain or prove directly what the operation of a defendant's mind was.... [A] wise and intelligent consideration of all of the facts and circumstances shown by the evidence may enable you to infer what the defendant's state of mind was.... Therefore, you may rely on circumstantial evidence in determining the defendant's state of mind. 106 In this regard, I instruct you that you may infer that a person ordinarily intends all the natural and probable consequences of an act knowingly done. In other words, you may infer and find that the defendants intended all the consequences that a person, standing in like circumstances and possessing like knowledge, should have expected to result from the acts he knowingly committed. 107 I also instruct you that the mere presence of a defendant where a crime is being committed, even coupled with knowledge that a crime is being committed, or the mere acquiescence by a defendant in the criminal conduct of others, even with guilty knowledge, is not sufficient to establish guilt of the crime charged here. 108 (Tr. 3024-36). 109 The jury convicted the defendants in response to this instruction, and specifically to the statement that you may infer and find that the defendants intended all the consequences that a person, standing in like circumstances and possessing like knowledge, should have expected to result from the acts he knowingly committed. 37 (Tr. 3024-36). Consequently in presenting their sufficiency challenges, the defendants must be arguing, in effect, either (1) that the general inference of intent that this instruction contemplates is impermissible, or (2) that even if the general inference is permissible, a reasonable person standing in the defendants' shoes would not have expected his or her actions to interfere with the victims' use of the public streets or to intimidate or deter the victim from engaging in this protected activity, or (3), more broadly, that a finding of intent is not enough and that specific motive or animus to punish or retaliate against the victim for his use of the streets is needed. 110 Once the defendants' sufficiency challenges are understood in this way, it becomes clear that their arguments in this connection must be rejected. To begin with, it is well-settled that, as a general matter, criminal intent may be proven by circumstantial evidence. See United States v. Atehortva, 17 F.3d 546, 550 (2d Cir. 1994). And, it is equally well established that, while a jury instruction in a criminal case that the law presumes that a person intends the ordinary consequences of his voluntary acts violates due process, see Sandstrom v. Montana, 442 U.S. 510 (1979), an instruction that merely permits a jury to infer that an accused intends such consequences of such acts is acceptable, see Francis v. Franklin, 471 U.S. 307, 315 (1985). The instruction in the case at bar, which contained the language you may infer, is unambiguously of the latter, and generally permissible, variety. 38 111 The specific inference that the district court instructed the jury that it might draw -- from an attack on a city street by participants in a mob roving the streets, to a specific intent to interfere with, intimidate, or dissuade the street-based activities of the victim of the attack -- is, moreover, also permissible. Whether a particular inference falls within the general rule that a jury may conclude that an actor intended foreseeable consequences of his actions depends upon whether a jury's conclusion that a consequence of the actions is foreseeable is rooted in reason or common sense. Payne v. LeFevre, 825 F.2d 702, 707 (2d Cir. 1987). Here, the defendants' actions clearly had the foreseeable effect of interfering with Rosenbaum's contemporaneous and immediate use of the city street on which he was attacked, and had this effect in a manner that could not possibly go unnoticed. Furthermore, the long-standing and intimate connection between public violence and racial and religious oppression, see supra pages 189-91, and the fear felt by victims of violence, in particular by those who have been singled out on the basis of their race or religion, convince us that any connection the jury might have drawn between the defendants' conduct and their intent to interfere with or deter future street use by Rosenbaum and by people similarly situated was firmly rooted in reason and common sense. 112 Moreover, as indicated earlier, we believe that the statute, while concerned with racial motivation and animus, did not impose a similar motivation requirement with respect to interference with participation in the relevant activities. That is, while we agree that a class-based motivation is required by the statute, proof of an activities-based intent is enough. We thus reach a conclusion similar to that presented in the Senate Committee Report, namely that evidence that a victim was attacked while actually engaged in a protected activity would ordinarily be enough to send the [question of activities-based intent] to a jury, because such facts would afford the basis for an inference that the assailant did intend to interfere with the protected activity. S. Rep. No. 90-721 at 9, reprinted in 1968 U.S.C.C.A.N. at 1844. 39 And we reject the defendants' challenges to the sufficiency of the evidence presented against them. 113 We note, as a final matter, that we are not alone in reaching this conclusion in a case in which the only evidence of activities-based intent is circumstantial. At least two other Circuit Courts have done the same pursuant to § 245. Thus the Sixth Circuit, upholding a conviction under § 245(b)(2)(F), concluded that the evidence that a defendant directed racial slurs at his victim while they were both in a night club was sufficient to allow a jury to determine that the defendant acted because the victim was enjoying the services of a public place of entertainment. United States v. Ebens, 800 F.2d 1422 (6th Cir. 1986). It reached this result on the ground that: 114 [t]he jury could... have found that [the defendant's] remarks were intended to make [the victim's] remaining on the premises uncomfortable and embarrassing and to intimidate and dissuade him from remaining on the premises.... 115 Ebens, 800 F.2d at 1429. Similarly, the Eighth Circuit held that even where there was no specific evidence of activities-intent and a defendant argued that an attack only incidentally occurred at a federal swimming area, the defendant's sufficiency challenge to his conviction under § 245(b)(2)(B) must be rejected. In such circumstances, the court stated: [I]t was for the jury to infer that the defendant intended to intimidate [his victim] and interfere with his use of the governmental facilities at [the swimming lake]. United States v. Price, 464 F.2d 1217, 1218 (8th Cir. 1972). 40 116 B. The Selection of the Jury. 117 Having determined that § 245(b)(2)(B) is a constitutional exercise of Congress's powers under the Thirteenth Amendment, that the statute applies to behavior of the type that the government charged the defendants with committing, and that the evidence presented at trial was sufficient to allow the jury to return its verdict of conviction, we turn now to addressing the defendants' challenges to the district court's actions in empaneling the jury that convicted them. 118 As we have described, see supra pages 171-72, the district court expressed concern throughout the jury selection process that any jury that was finally empaneled should represent[] the community. (Tr. 759). This meant to the district court that the jury should contain appropriate numbers of African Americans and Jews. Although the district court was clearly interested in seating close to an equal number of African Americans and Jews on the jury, the makeup of the jury pool -- which had very few Jews in it -- caused the district court's concern for such racial and religious balance to express itself principally, although by no means exclusively, in the form of efforts to prevent the final jury from containing too many African Americans and too few Jews. 119 In this respect, the district court made three related decisions, each of which the defendants now appeal. First, the district court denied the defendants' objection, made pursuant to Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), to the fact that even though the jury pool was 30% African American, the government used 55% of its peremptory challenges to strike African- American candidates from the jury. 41 Second, the district court denied the defendants' for-cause challenge against a Jewish juror (Juror 108) who had expressed grave doubts about his ability to be objective concerning the case, stating that he was pretty sensitive to issues affecting the Jewish community and that he was disappointed by the outcome of defendant Nelson's state murder trial. (Tr. 619-21). The district court denied the challenge in spite of the fact that at a second round of voir dire, in which the district court expressly asked Juror 108 to look into your heart and ask yourself whether you feel personal emotional internal pressures that would make it such that you couldn't give the defendant here a fair trial, Juror 108 answered I don't know. I honestly don't know. (Tr. 632). And third, when an African-American empaneled juror was excused because of illness, 42 the district court sua sponte shifted a second (and white) juror from the main panel to become an alternate juror and then filled the two open places on the jury with another African-American juror and with the Jewish Juror 108. 43 Both of these jurors were selected from the list of alternate jurors out of order, in violation of Fed. R. Crim. P. 24(c). 120 In this way, the district court secured what it deemed to be adequate numbers of African Americans and Jews on the main jury. Specifically, the final jury panel contained three African Americans, Jewish Juror 108, and another juror who, although she did not describe herself as Jewish, had Jewish parents. 121 That the district court was at once intent on achieving this or an equivalent result, and was fully aware that doing so might require adopting controversial methods, may be seen from the fact that, shortly before performing these manipulations, the court stated: 122 I will not allow this case to go to the jury without 108 as being a member of that jury, and how that will be achieved I don't know. It may well be just by people falling out. It may well happen, in which event I propose never to make any findings on this issue, and if I can I would seal the whole discussion because I see it serving no one's interest. I am not sure I can get away with that. I don't know if the press will allow it, but I don't think it would serve the public's interest to have this discussion go on the record, and especially, if I don't make any findings and I hope that I will not have to make any findings. 123 (T. 758). Despite this fact, the defendants' counsel expressly stated that this third manipulation of the jury selection process would be agreeable to the defendants, (Tr. 866), and the defendants themselves consented to the proposal on the record. 124 On appeal, the defendants contend that all three of the district court's jury-selection actions constitute reversible error. 44 Because we conclude that the facts underlying the defendants' second and third arguments taken together give rise to a meritorious challenge to the defendants' convictions, we need not consider the first claim. And so it is to the second and third arguments to which we now turn. 125 While normally we would treat these two claims separately from each other, (a) the unusual nature of the district court's race- and religion-based reshuffling, (b) the government's assertion that defendants - through the same acts - properly waived both their second and third challenges, and (c) the government's concessions - made on appeal - with respect to the third argument, render it necessary that we examine the second and third contentions in relation to each other. 126 In doing so, we face a series of complex questions: (a) whether a jury that is selected by a district court intentionally to achieve racial and religious objectives is a valid jury, (b) whether invalidity - if any - in a jury so selected constitutes a constitutional defect or - even if not necessarily unconstitutional - represents district court behavior that must be precluded by appellate courts in the exercise of their supervisory authority, (c) whether the flaws in such a jury panel can nevertheless be waived by the parties through their knowing consent, and (d) whether, even if such consent is to be deemed void, the refusal to permit waivers should be applied prospectively only, following a clear statement by a court of appeals of the inappropriateness of the actions consented to. In addition to these issues, we must also consider (a) whether Juror 108 was partial and hence properly challengeable for cause, (b) whether the erroneous seating of such a biased juror is waivable, 45 and (c) whether, even if it is waivable, the consent necessary to that waiver is validly given when the quid pro quo for it is the empaneling by the district court of a jury explicitly selected, in part, on the basis of race and religion. 127 Because we believe both (a) that in the case before us a biased juror was seated and (b) that the consent given to the selection of that juror was invalid, since it was obtained in exchange for the improper empaneling of a jury chosen partly on the basis of race and religion, we conclude that the defendants' convictions cannot stand. And we do so without giving ultimate answers to some of the other extraordinarily difficult questions that consensual racial or religious jurymandering present. 128
129 The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution grants criminal defendants the right to be tried by an impartial jury. U.S. Const. Amend.VI. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has observed, [o]ne touchstone of a fair trial is an impartial trier of fact -- a jury capable and willing to decide the case solely on the evidence before it. McDonough Power Equip., Inc. v. Greenwood, 464 U.S. 548, 554 (1984) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). The right to trial before an impartial trier of fact -- be it a jury or a judge -- therefore implicates Due Process as well as Sixth Amendment rights. 130 In the case at bar, Juror 108, from the beginning of his voir dire, expressed concern for events affecting the Jewish community and, in particular, voiced his dissatisfaction with the State proceedings that resulted in defendant Nelson's acquittal. Moreover, on further questioning, Juror 108 said that although he would like to think of himself as objective and able to give the defendants a fair trial, he [h]onestly... [didn't] know whether he could do so. (Tr. 619-21). And, the last answer Juror 108 gave when the district court asked him once again whether he could set aside his personal feelings and give the defendants a fair trial was I don't know. I honestly don't know. (Tr. 632). 131 In spite of these statements, and in the context of its express desire to ensure that the empaneled jury contained an adequate number of Jewish jurors, the district court denied the defendants' for cause challenge to Juror 108. Then, by the unusual -- and indeed illegal, see Fed. R. Crim. P. 24(c) -- method described above and discussed below, the district court placed Juror 108 on the main panel that decided the defendants' case. The defendants now challenge these decisions of the district court. 132 We review a district court's rejection of a defendant's for cause challenge to a juror for abuse of discretion. Murray, 618 F.2d at 899. Indeed, [t]here are few aspects of a jury trial where we would be less inclined to disturb a trial judge's exercise of discretion, absent clear abuse, than in ruling on challenges for cause in the empaneling of a jury. Ploof, 464 F.2d at 118 n.4. This is especially true when, as here, a for cause challenge to a juror's impartiality rests on a claim that the juror suffers from what is generally called actual bias, that is, the existence of a state of mind that leads to an inference that the person will not act with entire impartiality. United States v. Torres, 128 F.3d 38, 43 (2d Cir. 1997). 46 A district court's findings concerning actual bias are based upon determinations of demeanor and credibility that are peculiarly within a trial judge's province. Wainwright v. Witt, 469 U.S. 412, 428 (1985). 133 In spite of this deferential standard of review, we conclude that the district court abused its discretion, and committed reversible error, in denying the defendants' for cause challenge to Juror 108. We believe, in other words, that Juror 108 sufficiently revealed actual bias in his answers during voir dire to require his exclusion from the jury. [A] voir dire admission by the prospective juror of a state of mind prejudicial to a party's interest, United States v. Haynes, 398 F.2d 980, 984 (2d Cir. 1968), is the most common and direct ground on the basis of which actual bias is found to exist. The admissions, indeed the repeated and persistent admissions, made to the district court by Juror 108 are precisely of this sort. As two of our sister courts have said, [d]oubts about the existence of actual bias should be resolved against permitting the juror to serve, unless the prospective panelist's protestation of a purge of preconception is positive, not pallid. Bailey v. Bd. of County Comm'rs, 956 F.2d 1112, 1127 (11th Cir. 1992) (quoting United States v. Nell, 526 F.2d 1223, 1230 (5th Cir. 1976)). And as a third has added, a juror who `could probably be fair and impartial' should not be considered impartial, because `[p]robably' is not good enough. United States v. Sithithongtham, 192 F.3d 1119, 1121 (8th Cir. 1999). This is especially so when, as in this case, the potential bias does not represent only a general state of mind but also a predisposition to believe in the guilt of one of the very defendants who is being tried. 47 134 Furthermore, although we have acknowledged that, it is the rare juror who could honestly `guarantee' that his feelings about the particular type of crime alleged would in no way affect his deliberations. United States v. Murray, 618 F.2d 892, 899 (2d Cir. 1980), we have also called it crucial that in spite of these predispositions, a prospective juror should state[] in effect that she would do her best to determine the case on the evidence presented, and that she has made clear that her [predispositions] would not affect her judgment, and that she would determine the case solely on the evidence presented. Id. Thus, it is important that a juror who has expressed doubts about his or her impartiality also unambiguously assure the district court, in the face of these doubts, of her willingness to exert truly best efforts to decide the case without reference to the predispositions and based solely on the evidence presented at trial. See, e.g., United States v. Towne, 870 F.2d 880, 885 (2d Cir. 1989) (upholding the denial of a challenge for cause with respect to a juror who at first expressed reservations about her ability to be an impartial juror based on her knowledge of defendant's prosecution for various crimes in state court but who later promise[d] that she would try to decide the case based on the evidence presented); Ploof, 464 F.2d at 118 (doing the same when a juror who at first said that his thinking `might' be affected [based on a personal experience]; [but later] upon being reminded by the court of his oath,... said that he would do away with the `might' and that he would do his best). 135 Juror 108, having, inter alia, expressed his chagrin with defendant Nelson's state trial acquittal, never purged himself of his preconceptions. He never even asserted that he could probably be impartial. And he never promised to focus his attention on the evidence presented at trial. Specifically, Juror 108 never made clear... that []he would determine the case solely on the evidence presented, Murray, 618 F.2d at 899, or promise[d] that []he would try to decide the case based on the evidence presented, Towne, 870 F.2d at 885, or said that he would do his best, Ploof, 464 F.2d at 118, to decide the case in this impartial way. The most that Juror 108 said was that he would like to think that he could be impartial, but that he honestly [didn't] know. 136 The principal reason for which jurors are dismissed for cause is that they are unwilling or unable to follow the applicable law. United States v. Thomas, 116 F.3d 606, 616 (2d Cir. 1997). In the case at bar, this is the failing Juror 108 in effect admitted to and did not adequately take back. In light of this failing, we hold that the district court abused its discretion when it denied the defendants' for cause challenge to that juror. 137 This is not a case, moreover, in which, in spite of an erroneous refusal to strike a biased juror for cause, that biased juror was not in the end empaneled, so that the jury which was ultimately selected was fair and impartial. Towne, 870 F.2d at 885 (Since appellant has in no way established the partiality of the jury that ultimately convicted him, he may not successfully claim deprivation of his sixth amendment or due process rights.). That is, this is not a case in which, for example, an erroneous refusal to strike a biased juror for cause meant that the defendants had to use up one of their peremptory strikes to remove the offending juror from the pool. See Ross v. Oklahoma, 487 U.S. 81, 88 (1988) ([T]he fact that the defendant had to use a peremptory challenge to achieve [the result of an impartial jury] does not mean that the Sixth Amendment was violated.); United States v. Rubin, 37 F.3d 49, 54 (2d Cir. 1994) (holding that where an impartial jury was finally empaneled, the need to waste peremptory challenges to eliminate jurors whom the trial court should have removed for cause cannot be the basis of a Sixth Amendment challenge); see also United States v. Martinez-Salazar, 528 U.S. 304, 307 (2000) ([I]f the defendant elects to cure [a trial court's erroneous refusal to strike a juror for cause] by exercising a peremptory challenge, and is subsequently convicted by a jury on which no biased juror sat, he has not been deprived of any rule-based or constitutional right [i.e., of any right under the Sixth Amendment or under the Due Process Clause applied in connection with the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure].). 138 We are faced, instead, with a case in which the district court's erroneous refusal to strike Juror 108 on account of his bias, together with its other jury selection actions (to be discussed in due course), wrongly resulted in the empanelment of a jury on which the biased juror sat. Consequently, the defendants in this case were convicted, in contravention of the Sixth Amendment and due process, by a jury that cannot be deemed to have been fully impartial. 48 139
140 The district court's error in failing to strike Juror 108 for cause, coupled with its subsequently empaneling the biased juror, would ordinarily require us, without further analysis, to vacate the judgment of conviction and remand the case for a new trial before an unbiased fact finder. This case, however, presents an additional and crucial complication, namely that the defendants -- after originally objecting to the district court's failure to dismiss Juror 108 for cause -- subsequently did not merely fail to challenge the plan by means of which the district court placed Juror 108 on the main jury panel. Instead, they, both through their counsel, and by their own direct personal statements, expressly consented to the scheme. 141 The government argues that this express consent constituted a waiver -- that is, the intentional relinquishment or abandonment of a known right, Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U.S. 458, 464 (1938) -- of the defendants' objections to the district court's refusal to strike Juror 108 for cause. And the same consent, the government asserts, also negated whatever possible objections the defendants might have had to the failure of impartiality that might have been imparted to the jury as a result of empaneling Juror 108. As the government points out, a mere forfeiture, or failure timely to assert a right, does not preclude appellate review for plain error under Fed. R. Crim. P. 52(b), but a waiver bars even this highly deferential form of reexamination. United States v. Olano, 507 U.S. 725, 733 (1993); see also United States v. Yu-Leung, 51 F.3d 1116, 1121 (2d Cir. 1995) ([F]orfeiture does not preclude appellate consideration of a claim in the presence of plain error, whereas waiver necessarily `extinguishes' the claim altogether. (quoting Olano, 507 U.S. at 733)) Thus, the government contends, that the defendants, by agreeing to the plan that placed this juror on the panel, have extinguished the Sixth Amendment and due process rights that they now seek to assert on appeal. 49 142 We reject the government's argument. First, we have substantial doubts about whether the right to be tried by an impartial tribunal is waivable, at least once a for-cause challenge has been made. Moreover, we conclude that, even if the right is waivable, the defendants' acceptance of an improper jury selection plan, only one part of which involved the empaneling of Juror 108, does not constitute a valid waiver. 143 Some time ago, we indicated in powerful dicta that the right to an impartial fact finder might be inherently unwaivable. We said: 144 It has been asserted that a defendant cannot waive those rights without enforcement of which the proceedings against him would be fundamentally unfair. Among such non-waivable rights would be the right to be tried by an impartial tribunal, the right to be tried by a court free from mob domination-- and the right not to be convicted solely upon the basis of a coerced confession. Perhaps Mr. Justice Frankfurter was referring to this concept of non-waivable rights when he said [that ordinary principles of waiver] `do not touch one of those extraordinary cases in which a substantial claim goes to the very foundation of a proceeding. . . . .' 145 United States v. Fay, 300 F.3d 345, 350-51 (2d Cir. 1962) (quoting Brown v. Allen, 344 U.S. 443, 503 (1993) (internal citation omitted and emphasis added). 50 146 In expressing our continued allegiance to this dicta, we begin by making clear what we do not question. Thus we do not take issue with the uncontestable principle, applied in any number of cases dealing with any number of contexts, that even mere forfeiture of claims, including claims that attack the fundamental fairness of criminal proceedings, precludes all but plain error review of district court decisions. See generally Olano, 507 U.S. at 732. Nor do we assert that the technical requirements of Fed. R. Crim. P. 24(c), which govern the selection of alternate jurors and their movement onto the main panel, are unwaivable. See, e.g., United States v. Viserto, 596 F.2d 531, 539-40 (2d Cir. 1979) (finding express consent to a technical deviation from these procedures to constitute a valid waiver of the defendants' right to challenge this deviation on appeal); United States v. Josefik, 753 F.2d 585, 588 (7th Cir. 1985) (same); United States v. Baccari, 489 F.2d 274, 275 (10th Cir. 1973) (same); Leser v. United States, 358 F.2d 313, 317 (9th Cir. 1966) (same). Similarly, we, of course, do not suggest that the right to trial before an impartial jury cannot be waived in favor of trial by an impartial judge, or, indeed, waived altogether in favor of a guilty plea. See Singer v. United States, 380 U.S. 24, 36 (1965) (discussing the waiver of a jury trial in favor of a bench trial); McCarthy v. United States, 394 U.S. 459 (1969) (discussing the circumstances in which a guilty plea waives the right to stand trial). And we do not imply that all claims of structural error (of error that requires automatic reversal rather than harmless error review) are unwaivable. See Freytag v. Comm'r of Internal Revenue, 501 U.S. 868, 896 (1991) (Scalia, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment) (arguing that many forms of structural error may for many purposes be waived). Finally, we do not assert that the presence of a possibly biased juror, whose bias has never been challenged by defendants at voir dire, necessarily taints the jury panel. 51 147 Instead of addressing these or other broader questions, we limit our concern to the very narrow set of facts before us. Where the trier of fact in a criminal trial is a biased jury that resulted from a district court's erroneous failure to grant a for-cause challenge to an actually biased juror whose bias was revealed at voir dire, we question whether a defendant can subsequently waive his claim that he has been deprived of the right to be tried before an impartial fact finder. At the root of our concern is the fundamental, indeed foundational, role impartiality plays in our system of courts. Thus, quite apart from offending the Sixth Amendment, trying an accused before a jury that is actually biased violates even the most minimal standards of due process. See In re Murchison, 349 U.S. 133, 136 (1955) (A fair trial in a fair tribunal is a basic requirement of due process.); cf. In re Oliver, 333 U.S. 257 (1948); Tumey v. Ohio, 273 U.S. 510 (1927). 148 Having said all of this, we do not need to decide today whether in every such case the seating of a clearly biased juror who had earlier been challenged is unwaivable. For it is clearly the case that, even if such an act is waivable, the waiver must be totally free and uncoerced and any consideration given for the consent must be utterly free from taint. It must be so to overcome what the Supreme Court has called the presumption against the waiver of constitutional rights. Brookhart v. Janis, 384 U.S. 1, 4 (1966). And we do not believe that the consideration given in this case comes close to meeting this test. 149 In the context most nearly analogous to the one before us -- the waiver, by guilty plea, of the right (among others) to trial by jury, see McCarthy v. United States, 394 U.S. 459 (1969) -- the presumption against a valid consent plays itself out in the form of the rule that a guilty plea is good only if entered by one fully aware of the direct consequences of [the plea], including the actual value of any commitments made to him by the court. Brady v. United States, 397 U.S. 742, 755 (1970) (internal quotation marks omitted). Accordingly, a guilty plea -- and the waiver of the right to trial by jury accomplished by the entry of that plea -- may be invalidated if it is induced by... misrepresentation (including... unfulfillable promises), or, perhaps, by promises that are by their nature improper. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). That is, as Brady says, the quid pro quo must be both fullfilable and proper. Thus, a guilty plea obtained by promising a defendant cigarettes, liquor, or unlimited spousal visitation rights, even if these promises were fulfillable, would not stand. 150 With these requirements in mind, and to see whether the consent given to the seating of Juror 108 was valid, we must examine what the defendants were offered in exchange for their waiver. 151
152 At the close of the orderly process of jury selection, the district court faced a jury that it viewed as insufficiently racially and religiously diverse. When one of the empaneled jurors was excused because of illness, the district court formulated a novel plan in order to cure this perceived defect. As is by now familiar, the court sua sponte removed a second, and white, juror from the main panel and then filled the two newly open places on the jury with an African-American and a Jewish juror (Juror 108) respectively, both of whom were selected from the list of alternate jurors out of order. Furthermore, the record leaves no room for doubting that it was the jurors' race and religion that motivated the district court's choice of which juror to remove from the main panel and its decision to move the two chosen alternate jurors onto the main panel ahead of the non-African-American, non-Jewish jurors who were next in line. 52 153 What the district court did in its effort to achieve a racially and religiously balanced jury was unquestionably highly unusual. It was also improper. The error is made plain by the reasoning behind Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 78, 89 (1986), and Georgia v. McCollum, 505 U.S. 42, 59 (1992), in which the Supreme Court held that neither prosecutors nor defendants could, without violating the Equal Protection Clause, exercise peremptory strikes on the basis of race. After these cases it is beyond peradventure that the racial and religious reconstruction of the jury that occurred in this case could not constitutionally have been achieved at the instigation of the parties. And what the district court could not allow the parties to do, it also could not do of its own motion even with the consent of the parties. Indeed, the violation of equal protection that occurs when a person is excluded from a jury on the basis of his race (or religion) would seem only to be made more serious when the exclusion occurs at the behest not just of the parties but of the court itself, whose duties under the Equal Protection Clause are particularly strong. And, although the motives behind the district court's race- and religion-based jury selection procedures were undoubtedly meant to be tolerant and inclusive rather than bigoted and exclusionary, that fact cannot justify the district court's race-conscious actions. The significance of a jury in our polity as a body chosen apart from racial and religious manipulations is too great to permit categorization by race or religion even from the best of intentions. 154 As the Supreme Court has said, [t]he Fourteenth Amendment's mandate that race discrimination be eliminated from all official acts and proceedings of the State is most compelling in the judicial system. Powers v. Ohio, 499 U.S. 400, 415 (1991). 53 Indeed, so central is equal protection to the legitimate functioning of the courts and specifically of juries that Congress has enacted a separate statute mandating that [n]o citizen possessing all other qualifications which are or may be prescribed by law shall be disqualified for service as grand or petit juror in any court of the United States, or of any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. 18 U.S.C. § 243. This statutory prohibition, as the Supreme Court has said, makes race neutrality in jury selection a visible, and inevitable, measure of the judicial system's own commitment to the commands of the Constitution, and accordingly, [t]he courts are under an affirmative duty to enforce the strong statutory and constitutional policies embodied in that prohibition. Powers, 499 U.S. at 416. There can be no doubt that the district court's race- and religion- based jury reconstruction (no matter how well motivated) directly violated this affirmative duty and hence was unacceptable. 155 This is so, moreover, regardless of whether the racial and religious jurymandering engaged in by the court formally violated the Equal Protection Clause, or simply came to the very edge of doing so. For, even if such actions were not unconstitutional, they would still be sufficiently inappropriate to a federal court as to be subject to our inherent supervisory authority. Our authority over the district courts, though not a form of free-flowing justice, untethered to legal principle does allow us to ensure that fair standards of procedure are maintained and to review procedures used in federal courts [without being] limited to ascertaining whether they are constitutionally valid. United States v. Ming He, 94 F.3d 782, 792 (2d Cir. 1996) (citing McNabb v. United States, 318 U.S. 332, 340 (1943)). 156 The government contends, however, that since in this case the parties agreed to the racial and religious reconstruction of the jury, as they undoubtedly did, whatever objections (either constitutional or otherwise) exist to the court's action have been waived and cannot now be raised. The difficulty with this argument is that, if it were to be countenanced, parties could always, with the court's consent, empanel a jury that was of precisely the racial and religious mix that they wished. If the court was of like mind, there would be nothing to stop civil litigants from agreeing, for example, that a contract or tort action between them should be heard by a jury composed only of members of their own racial or religious groups. And all Congress's and the Supreme Court's language about race neutrality in jury selection as a measure of the judicial system's commitment to the commands of the Constitution, Powers, 499 U.S. at 416, would be a dead letter. Of course, parties can, in appropriate situations, opt out of the judicial system - say by agreeing to arbitration. And if they do so, they can choose arbiters of whatever racial or religious sorts they wish. But that is totally different from bending the judicial system to their racial and religious preferences. For, unlike private institutions, the judicial system belongs not to the parties but to the nation. 157 It is for analogous reasons that the Supreme Court has treated as unwaivable a formally similar, if substantively very different, claim involving a threat to another set of judicial structures. In Freytag v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 501 U.S. 868 (1991), the Supreme Court considered a challenge, under the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, Art II, § 2, cl. 2, to the authority of the Chief Judge of the United States Tax Court to appoint Special Trial Judges to preside over tax disputes, pursuant to 26 U.S.C. § 7441. The Court reached the merits of this claim-in spite of the fact that the petitioners had waived it by consenting to appear before such a Special Trial Judge-and found that the petitioners' challenge invoked the strong interest of the federal judiciary in maintaining the constitutional plan of separation of powers. Freytag, 501 U.S. at 879 (internal quotation marks omitted). In effect, the High Court concluded, the importance of the petitioner's claim so implicated the very structural authority of the tribunal they contested that their claim could not be waived by their individual action. See also Glidden v. Zdanok, 370 U.S. 530, 535-36 (1941) (plurality opinion) (treating an Appointments Clause objection to judicial officers as unwaivable). In Freytag, as in the case before us, the parties, in concert with the relevant judge, could, absent unwaivability, persist in using an illegitimate decision maker to the permanent detriment of the nation's judicial system. 158 Perhaps recognizing the fundamental problems that would adhere to permitting waivers of racially and religiously tested jurors, the government at oral argument in effect conceded that such arrangements should be forbidden in the future, regardless of the parties' consent. But it urged the court to permit the waiver, in view of the lack of express prior judicial disapproval of what had occurred, and to ratify, just this once, what the district court had done. 54 Thus at the first of two oral arguments held on this appeal, the following colloquy occurred: 159 The Government: There have been cases that this Court has essentially decided that certain procedures were improper and would not be condoned in the future on a prospective basis. That's happened. And this might be such a case. 160 The Court: How do we do that? Do we say that in this case [we affirm the conviction below] but in the future, if the prosecution agrees to something like this, it is acting at its peril because in the future we will reverse? 161 The Government: Sounds good. 162 The Court: What? 163 The Government: Sounds good. 164 The Court: Sounds better to you than it does to me, maybe. 165 The Government: Read it over a few times. You'll get used to it, Judge. Oral Argument Tr., May 3, 2000, at 48-49. 166 In the end, however, we need not decide whether the government's prospective only proposal should be accepted. As with the question of whether a jury, chosen as this one was, is unconstitutional or simply subject to reproval under our supervisory authority, no answer is needed to decide the case before us. This is so because of the presence on the final jury of a juror, number 108, whom we have found to be biased. 55 167 4. The Combined Effect of Juror 108 and of Race- and Religion-Based Reshuffling of the Jury. 168 The defendants before us did not consent to the empaneling of Juror 108 standing alone. They agreed to his seating only in the context of the district court's larger scheme to secure a jury that displayed the racial and religious diversity that the district court desired. In effect, the defendants, at the district court's prompting, consented to the placement of Juror 108 on the panel in exchange for the assignment to the panel, of an additional African-American juror in the place of a different white juror who would otherwise have been seated. This exchange, however, was improper, because the benefit to be received by the defendants in connection with the exchange -- the replacement by the court of a white juror with an African-American juror solely on the basis of race -- was itself improper. And this impropriety invalidated any waiver of the defendants' complaint concerning Juror 108's bias that might otherwise be found in their acceptance of the district court's larger plan. 56 169 We conclude that the district court erred in declining to remove Juror 108 from the jury for actual bias, and that the defendants' acceptance of the district court's jury-packing scheme (which placed Juror 108 on the jury) did not constitute a valid waiver of that error and of their claim of unconstitutional bias in the jury before which their case was tried. That is, we hold that a waiver to a juror's impartiality cannot be accepted when it was obtained by the promise of seating a jury with what the defendants apparently believed were desirable racial characteristics. 57 170