Opinion ID: 184400
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Jury Venire Issues

Text: 15 Appellants raise both a statutory and a constitutional challenge to the racial composition of their jury venire. They maintain that white jurors were systematically underrepresented in the juror pool they received. According to appellants, white jurors constitute roughly a third of the population in the District of Columbia eligible to serve on juries, yet constituted only 23% of the jurors drawn for appellants' venire. This disparity, appellants maintain, is due in part to the fact that potential white jurors were more likely than nonwhites to obtain hardship deferrals of their jury service--at least half of the fifty-four deferrals in the jury pool used by the district court for the venire in appellants' trial were white. Appellants therefore contend that the low number of white people in their venire violated both the Jury Selection and Service Act (Jury Selection Act), which codifies the right to a jury selected at random from a fair cross section of the community, 28 U.S.C. § 1861 (1994), and the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees criminal defendants the right to trial by an impartial jury. We conclude that appellants have failed to meet their evidentiary burden to show their rights were violated. Jury Selection and Service Act Claim 16 The government argues for the first time on appeal that appellants' Jury Selection Act contention is untimely. Relying on cases stating that the timeliness requirement is to be strictly construed, United States v. Bearden, 659 F.2d 590, 595 (5th Cir. Unit B 1981); accord United States v. Contreras, 108 F.3d 1255, 1266 (10th Cir.1997); United States v. Paradies, 98 F.3d 1266, 1277 (11th Cir.1996); United States v. Young, 822 F.2d 1234, 1239 (2d Cir.1987), the government notes that voir dire began on February 1, 1995, but appellants did not file their motion objecting to the venire until February 3, 1995. 17 The Jury Selection Act requires that any motion to dismiss the indictment or stay the proceedings on the ground of a substantial failure to comply with the statute must be filed no later than before the voir dire examination begins. 28 U.S.C. § 1867(a) (1994). 1 Appellants filed their motion to stay proceedings on Friday morning, February 3, 1995, and promptly brought it to the attention of the district court. This was two days after they had first seen the members of the jury venire in person, on Wednesday, February 1, 1995, and after the members of the jury venire had responded in writing to a detailed written questionnaire. That questionnaire consisted of questions that the district court had approved after receiving suggested questions from appellants' counsel and the prosecutor. Because the questionnaire, particularly in view of appellants' participation in determining its content, could be viewed as the initial phase of voir dire examination, see, e.g., United States v. George (In re Washington Post ), 20 Media L. Rep. (BNA) 1511, 1511 (D.D.C.1992), appellants' motion would appear to be untimely. 18 The difficulty with this conclusion arises from the fact that the Jury Selection Act and the jury selection procedures utilized by the district court effectively foreclosed the filing of appellants' motion at an earlier time. The Jury Selection Act required appellants both to file their motion before the voir dire examination began, and to support it with a sworn statement of facts that, if true, would demonstrate a substantial failure to comply with the statute. 2 See 28 U.S.C. § 1867(d); Bearden, 659 F.2d at 597; United States v. Kennedy, 548 F.2d 608, 613 (5th Cir.1977). Yet, appellants did not see a list of the jurors who would be in their venire until the members of the jury venire were brought into the courtroom on Wednesday, February 1, 1995. Even if they could have seen the list of venire jurors in the jury office, see 28 U.S.C. § 1867(f), prior to that date, the list would not have included information on the ethnicity or gender of the jurors. Nor is it clear on this record that appellants could have obtained the information from another source prior to trial. The absence of such information precluded appellants from providing a detailed and supported motion outlining their jury concerns at the moment they first learned, at least by eyesight, of the ethnic and gender composition of the jury on February 1, 1995. 19 The Fifth Circuit has indicated that it might waive a procedural requirement of the Jury Selection Act if circumstances indicated that counsel could not reasonably have been expected to comply with the procedural prerequisites to a statutory challenge to the jury. Kennedy, 548 F.2d at 613. Assuming that the government has not waived its timeliness objection, we need not decide whether appellants would be entitled to such an exception, because appellants' Jury Selection Act claim is unsupported by the evidence necessary for the court to conclude that there has been a substantial violation of the Jury Selection Act. 3 28 U.S.C. § 1867(a); United States v. Spriggs, 102 F.3d 1245, 1251 (D.C.Cir.1996); United States v. Barnette, 800 F.2d 1558, 1567 (11th Cir.1986). 20 To succeed on their Jury Selection Act contention, appellants must demonstrate a substantial violation of the two related goals of the statute: random selection and objective disqualifications. See 28 U.S.C. §§ 1861, 1866(c); Spriggs, 102 F.3d at 1251; United States v. North, 910 F.2d 843, 909 (D.C.Cir.1990). Appellants maintain that the jury office in this district grants hardship deferments more liberally than the Jury Selection Act permits, see 28 U.S.C. § 1866(c)(1), and then recalls deferred jurors en masse, rather than distributing them evenly among the venires. As a result of the combination of these two practices, appellants contend, some venires are disproportionately white because they are composed in part of disproportionately white deferred jurors. 21 Although such a practice would be cause for concern, see 28 U.S.C. § 1866(c), appellants have produced almost no evidence of its existence, let alone evidence that it was a regular occurrence that produced a substantial violation of the Jury Selection Act. They rely solely on counsel's declaration that [o]n February 13, 1995, I learned that no previously deferred jurors have been added to any jury group in this Court since approximately October, 1994. Such hearsay information does not demonstrate that the jury office deferral practices in this district substantially violate the statute. See, e.g., United States v. Layton, 519 F.Supp. 946, 955 (N.D.Cal.1981). Sixth Amendment Claim 22 Appellants' Sixth Amendment contention fares no better. The Sixth Amendment guarantees a criminal defendant the right to a trial by an impartial jury. The Supreme Court has held that an impartial jury is one drawn from a representative cross-section of the community. Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 528, 95 S.Ct. 692, 697, 42 L.Ed.2d 690 (1975). 23 In order to establish a prima facie violation of the fair-cross-section requirement, the defendant must show (1) that the group alleged to be excluded is a distinctive group in the community; (2) that the representation of this group in venires for which juries are selected is not fair and reasonable in relation to the number of such persons in the community; and (3) that this underrepresentation is due to systematic exclusion of the group in the jury-selection process. 24 Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357, 364, 99 S.Ct. 664, 668, 58 L.Ed.2d 579 (1979). 4 Appellants contend that the disparity between the percentage of whites in their venire and the percentage of eligible white jurors in the District of Columbia suggests that whites are systematically excluded from juries in the district court. They point to the evidence that although whites comprise approximately one-third of the eligible jurors in the district, they comprised only 23% of the venire in their case. Yet appellants cannot show on the basis of this single instance of disparity that there has been a systematic exclusion of whites from the jury. Cf., e.g. Duren, 439 U.S. at 366, 99 S.Ct. at 669-70 (reversing conviction on the basis of jury selection practices over a year); Castaneda v. Partida, 430 U.S. 482, 496 n. 17, 97 S.Ct. 1272, 1281 n. 17, 51 L.Ed.2d 498 (1977) (same, over a decade). Underrepresentation of a cognizable group in a single venire, without evidence of a greater pattern, is insufficient to establish the systematic exclusion of the group required by Duren, 439 U.S. at 364, 99 S.Ct. at 668. See, e.g., United States v. Ruiz-Castro, 92 F.3d 1519, 1527 (10th Cir.1996); United States v. Hardwell, 80 F.3d 1471, 1486 (10th Cir.1996); Ford v. Seabold, 841 F.2d 677, 685 (6th Cir.1988); Timmel v. Phillips, 799 F.2d 1083, 1086-87 (5th Cir.1986); United States v. Jones, 687 F.2d 1265, 1269-70 (8th Cir.1982). From a small sample size based on one venire it is difficult to determine whether the disparity is random or systemic. 25 Accordingly, because appellants have not produced evidence that would demonstrate either a substantial violation of the Jury Selection Act or a substantial underrepresentation as would violate their Sixth Amendment right, their jury venire contentions fail. 5