Opinion ID: 204136
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Challenge to Jury Selection

Text: With these additions to the record, we now address all remaining issues in the appeal, beginning with appellant's challenges to the conduct of jury selection. In this case, the district court employed the so-called blind strike method of jury selection. Under this method, both parties simultaneously, rather than in alternating strikes, exercise their peremptory challenges and thus do not know which jurors the other has struck. E.g., United States v. Bermudez, 529 F.3d 158, 163-64 (2d Cir. 2008), cert. denied, 129 S. Ct. 956 (2009). The Rules of Criminal Procedure provide that ordinarily a 2 In this note, the jury requested copies of the indictment and the court's instructions of law, as well as an explanation of an unspecified issue from the district court. See Gonzalez-Melendez I, 570 F.3d at 3. -7- defendant in a non-capital felony case is entitled to ten peremptory challenges, and the prosecution is entitled to six. Id. at 164 (citing Fed. R. Crim. P. 24(b)(2)); see also United States v. Brown, 510 F.3d 57, 72 n.12 (1st Cir. 2007). Should the district court choose to seat any alternate jurors, see Fed. R. Crim. P. 24(c)(1), the rules require that each party be given additional peremptory challenges. Fed. R. Crim. P. 24(c)(4). These additional peremptory challenges may only be exercised on alternate jurors. Id.; United States v. Brown, 510 F.3d 57, 72 (1st Cir. 2007). To ensure this, the district court is required to designate the alternate jurors at voir dire. Brown, 510 F.3d at 72. Here, the district court chose to seat two alternate jurors. Consistent with Rule 24(c)(4)(A), it awarded each party an additional peremptory challenge. See Rule 24(c)(4)(A) (providing that each party is entitled to One Additional peremptory challenge when the court empanels two alternates). This gave the defense a total of eleven peremptory challenges (ten from Rule 24(b)(2) and one from Rule 24(c)(4)(A)), and the government seven (six from Rule 24(b)(2) and one from Rule 24(c)(4)(A)). At voir dire, however, the court did not designate which jurors would be alternates. Instead, it allowed each side to exercise their peremptory strikes against an undesignated pool of jurors. The defendant argues that this jury selection procedure -8- violated Rule 24(c)'s explicit command that the additional peremptory challenge conferred by that Rule be used only to strike alternate jurors, and consequently, impaired his exercise of his peremptory challenges. Our review of this argument, preserved below, is de novo, see United States v. Gonzalez-Velez, 466 F.3d 27, 39 (1st Cir. 2006). The district court erred when it failed to designate the alternate jurors at voir dire. The mandate in Rule 24(c)(4) that 'additional challenges may be used only to remove alternate jurors' implies that these alternates must be designated at voir dire, when the parties still have the opportunity to use peremptory challenges to remove potential jurors . . . . Brown, 510 F.3d at 72; United States v. Flaherty, 668 F.2d 566, 601 (1st Cir. 1981); see also United States v. Brewer, 199 F.3d 1283, 1287 (11th Cir. 2000); United States v. Love, 134 F.3d 595, 601 (4th Cir. 1998). Gonzalez-Melendez argues that this error requires automatic reversal. He relies upon our decision in United States v. Vargas, in which we said that [t]he denial or impairment of the right [to exercise peremptory challenges] is reversible error without a showing or prejudice. 606 F.2d 341, 346 (1st Cir. 1979) (quoting Swain v. Alabama, 380 U.S. 202, 219 (1965)). In recent years, however, the Supreme Court has disavowed the sort of reasoning used in Vargas and has indicated that mistaken denials of peremptory challenges do not ordinarily warrant automatic reversal. -9- See Rivera v. Illinois, 129 S. Ct. 1446, 1455 (2009); United States v. Martinez-Salazar, 528 U.S. 304, 317 n.4 (2000). Instead, we must ask whether the Rule 24(c)(4) error affected GonzalezMelendez's substantial rights. Fed. R. Crim. P. 52(a). Under that approach, we deem non-constitutional errors to be harmless when it is highly probable that the error did not influence the verdict. United States v. Pakala, 568 F.3d 47, 52 (1st Cir. 2009) (quoting United States v. García-Morales, 382 F.3d 12, 17 (1st Cir. 2004)). On two previous occasions, we have held that a violation of Rule 24(c) did not affect the defendant's substantial rights. Brown, 510 F.3d at 72; Flaherty, 668 F.2d at 601. In both of these decisions, we expressed skepticism about the prejudicial impact of a Rule 24(c) violation. Brown, 510 F.3d at 73 ([W]hile we regret the district court's failure to follow the rule, we cannot imagine how Brown's substantial rights could possibly have been prejudiced.); Flaherty, 510 F.3d at 73 (Despite the clear transgression of the rule, we do not perceive how defendants' exercise of their peremptory challenges was curtailed in any way. . . We do not think that combining the regular and alternate challenges amounts to a violation of defendants' substantial rights . . . .). Gonzalez-Melendez, however, distinguishes Brown and Flaherty. Unlike in those cases, he observes, in this case an alternate juror was actually seated. Thus, he claims, prejudice is readily apparent in his case. -10- We do not see how that conclusion follows. It is not evident that the composition of the jury would have differed had the district court adhered to Rule 24(c)(4). Moreover, even if a different venire member would have been selected as the alternate juror, there is no basis in the record for concluding that the alteration in jury composition had an injurious influence on the verdict. Therefore, we conclude that the court's error was harmless.