Opinion ID: 2982291
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Underrepresentation

Text: As to the degree of underrepresentation of African-Americans and minorities, the record contains an affidavit by the chief deputy clerk of the Eastern District of Tennessee, as ordered by the court, that explains the jury selection process and includes reports detailing the demographic make-up of the jury pool in the district’s Northeastern Division in 2005 and 2009. According to these reports—filed pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1863(a)—in 2005, African-Americans comprised 1.86 percent of the qualified jurors in the master jury wheel filled and 2.2 percent of the general population of voting age in the division.1 All ethnic minorities comprised 3.5 percent of the wheel and the same percentage in the general population.2 In 2009, the next time the wheel was filled, African-Americans comprised 1.31 percent of qualified jurors. All minorities made up 3.27 percent of the pool. 1 In his briefs, Maddox bases his argument on an assumption that Africans-Americans comprise 2.9 percent of the general population. Yet, as the government notes, this figure comes from aggregate Census data that include residents ineligible for juror duty, such as children younger than eighteen years of age. According to the deputy clerk’s affidavit, the 2.2 percent figure comes from population tables of U.S. citizens of eighteen years or more that are provided by the Census Bureau and are based on the 2000 Census. 2 As the magistrate judge noted, the grand jury that indicted Maddox was impaneled in 2008 and drawn from the master jury wheel filled in 2005. -7- Case Nos. 11-5829/5837/5860/6191/6192/6196/6198, United States v. Miller, et al. There are two ways to compare these numbers—either way, Maddox’s argument is frivolous. The easiest way is to look at the simple difference between the percentage of AfricanAmericans in the jury wheel and in the general population. This difference was less than one percent in both years. The other way to evaluate the degree of underrepresentation is to look at the ratio between the percentage of African-Americans in the jury wheel and in the general population. Here, the percentage of African-Americans in the 2005 wheel represented about 84.5 percent of the rate of African-Americans in the general population at the time. For the 2009 pool, this rate was 59.5 percent. Between the two pools, the rate averages 77 percent. This underrepresentation is lower than rates of underrepresentation found to be substantial by the Supreme Court. See, e.g., Castaneda, 430 U.S. at 486–87 (MexicanAmericans comprised 39 percent of jury wheel, about half of their rate (79.1 percent) in the general population); Sims v. Georgia, 389 U.S. 404, 407 (1967) (African-Americans constituted 24.4 percent of taxpayer population, but only 4.7 percent of grand jury); Whitus v. Georgia, 385 U.S. 545, 552 (1967) (the 9.1 percent of African-Americans in the grand jury pool constituted about one third of their rate in the general population of taxpayers (27.1 percent), a disparity that “strongly points” to discrimination), but see Turner v. Fouche, 396 U.S. 346, 359 (1970) (the rate of African-Americans in the jury pool (37 percent) represented about 61 percent of the group’s rate in the general population (60 percent), an underrepresentation that is not “so insubstantial as to warrant no corrective action by a federal court charged with the responsibility of enforcing constitutional guarantees,” particularly where 171 of the 178 potential jurors dubiously excluded for lack of “intelligence” or “uprightness” were African-American). The underrepresentation is even less substantial when taking into account the relatively small size of the overall population of African-Americans in the area. -8- Case Nos. 11-5829/5837/5860/6191/6192/6196/6198, United States v. Miller, et al. Maddox takes issue with these figures, noting that the clerk’s “documentation fail[ed] to distinguish between the pools of prospective and grand and petit jurors” and “did not distinguish between those who were merely part of the jury pools and those who actually served.” As to the first issue, the clerk did not distinguish between the jury pools because, according to the affidavit, prospective jurors for both petit and grand juries were drawn from the same jury wheel. As to Maddox’s second point, this Court does not find the absence of this information determinative, as the Constitution protects against the systemic exclusion of identifiable groups from the jury selection process—but does not guarantee a particular make-up of an empaneled jury. See Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 538 (1975) (“Defendants are not entitled to a jury of any particular composition.”). For the same reason, the Court is not persuaded by the affidavit of a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Tennessee, who—based on his memory alone—declared that “at most . . . a half dozen” of the approximately 1,200 grand jurors he observed from 1978 to 2007 were ethnic minorities.