Opinion ID: 2600689
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Washington Case

Text: The first case stems from a cocaine transaction that resulted in a triple murder, attempted murder, sexual assault, and robbery in 1998. In July 2003, following a three-week jury trial in Arapahoe County, Washington was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder after deliberation; four counts of aggravated robbery; and one count each of attempted first-degree murder, second-degree kidnapping, aggravated first-degree sexual assault, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, and accessory to a crime. The trial court sentenced Washington to consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole on the three counts of first-degree murder, and consecutive sentences for various terms of years on the remaining convictions. During jury selection, Washington filed a motion to dismiss the jury pool based on his contention that the jury-selection process in Arapahoe County systematically excluded African-Americans and Hispanics such that the jury in his trial failed to represent a fair cross-section of the community. The trial court conducted a post-trial hearing on Washington's motion where Washington presented expert testimony on the amount of underrepresentation of African-Americans and Hispanics on jury panels in Arapahoe County and on the likelihood that such underrepresentation occurred by chance. The evidence presented by Washington showed that in Colorado, the State Court Administrator uses state driver's license and voting records to create master lists of prospective jurors, called jury wheels, for every county in the state. Each week, the counties randomly select a group of prospective jurors from their jury wheel to form the jury panel for that week's trials. To reduce the likelihood that some prospective jurors in the jury wheel will be selected for jury duty more often than others, the State Court Administrator also assigns each prospective juror a service rank based on previous selection for jury service during the last five years. Pursuant to the Colorado Uniform Jury Selection and Service Act, prospective jurors with the least amount of jury service in recent years are selected for jury service before those who have served more recently. See § 13-71-108(2). The State Court Administrator also creates a jury wheel for the City of Aurora, which is located mostly, but not entirely, in Arapahoe County. Prior to March 2003, prospective jurors who resided in the part of Aurora located in Arapahoe County were removed entirely from Arapahoe County's jury wheel because they were in Aurora's jury wheel. In March 2003, that practice ceased, and prospective jurors who resided in the part of Aurora located in Arapahoe County were added back into Arapahoe County's jury wheel. [2] The service rank assigned to prospective jurors in Aurora's jury wheel was reassigned to them as their service rank in Arapahoe County's jury wheel. These prospective jurors remained in both jury wheels. Hence, in July 2003, the month of Washington's trial, all 398,539 prospective jurors in Arapahoe County, including those who resided in Aurora, were available for selection from the county's jury wheel. However, the service rank of the prospective jurors who resided in the part of Aurora located in Arapahoe County was based on previous selection for jury service during the last five years from Aurora's jury wheel, not from Arapahoe County's jury wheel. Washington's expert witness, Robert Bardwell, who was qualified as an expert statistician with regard to jury composition and the demographics from which juries are drawn, presented evidence that Arapahoe County's minority population is concentrated in the Aurora part of the county. As a result, Bardwell explained, the practice of removing prospective jurors who resided in the part of Aurora located in Arapahoe County from Arapahoe County's jury wheel prior to March 2003 resulted in an underrepresentation of minorities, African-Americans and Hispanics in particular, on jury panels in Arapahoe County. Bardwell testified that remedying the underrepresentation required not only adding these prospective jurors back into Arapahoe County's jury wheel, but also assigning them a service rank of zero in Arapahoe County's jury wheel and giving them credit toward their service rank only for service in Arapahoe County district and county courts. [3] Bardwell explained that Arapahoe County is the only place in the state where you get to have county and district court service by service in municipal court. For example, when prospective jurors are selected for jury service from the City of Colorado Springs' jury wheel, they do not receive credit toward their service rank in El Paso County's jury wheel. Bardwell also testified that Arapahoe County continues to give these prospective jurors double credit for their service in Aurora municipal court: There's no plan that I know of to terminate the assignment of service rank and, likewise, they're  they're still using service rank in the selection of jury pools. Bardwell testified that in 2003, African-Americans comprised 7.7% of the population of Arapahoe County and 7.4% of the county's jury panels, and that Hispanics comprised 12.9% of Arapahoe County's population and 12.6% of the county's jury panels. He concluded that the 0.3% absolute disparity between the percentage of these two minority groups in the county's population and on its jury panels was statistically significant, meaning that it is statistically unlikely that the disparity would occur by chance in a nondiscriminatory setting. Bardwell determined that the likelihood that the underrepresentation of African-Americans on Arapahoe County's jury panels occurred by chance was 0.008%, and 0.120% with respect to Hispanics. In other words, according to Bardwell, the underrepresentation of African-Americans on Arapahoe County's jury panels occurred by chance eight out of every 100,000 times, and 120 out of every 100,000 times with respect to Hispanics. On cross-examination by the prosecutor, Bardwell explained that the small size of the absolute disparity in this case was due to the law of large numbers: [Prosecutor]: I don't understand why you say it [the disparity] is still significant [in 2003]. [Bardwell]: It's called the law of large numbers. But it just amounts to this. If you throw a coin once, half the time it's heads, half the time it's tails. So if you throw it 50 times, it's going to be  most of the time it's going to be  or almost all of the time it's going to be pretty close to 50-50. Some deviation. The longer you throw that coin, in this case, select jurors from a fair pool, you  you  the absolute  how many  I mean, if you expected 10,000 black jurors, you might be hundreds short. But the percentage differences get smaller and smaller the larger the numbers. The trial court denied Washington's motion to dismiss the jury panel. It found that the wheel represents the community statistically; that to the extent there was any underrepresentation of African-Americans or Hispanics on jury panels in Arapahoe County at the time of Washington's trial, such underrepresentation was not a result of statistical systematic exclusion; and that irrespective of whether the underrepresentation was the result of statistical systematic exclusion, the jury venire in Washington's case represented a fair cross-section of the community. In addition, the trial court found that even assuming the underrepresentation was a result of statistical systematic exclusion, it was justified because service credit is a significant, indeed a compelling state interest, and the practice of giving double credit to prospective jurors for service in Aurora municipal court comported with the state interest of equitably distributing the responsibility for jury service among prospective jurors in Arapahoe County's jury wheel. The court of appeals affirmed the trial court's ruling, explaining that the four statistical measures used by Washington's expert are used by courts throughout the country to assess whether a particular jury-selection process resulted in the systematic exclusion of a distinctive group in the community, such as African-Americans or Hispanics. See Washington, 179 P.3d at 159-64. Those statistical measures are: (1) absolute disparity, (2) comparative disparity, (3) absolute impact, and (4) statistical significance. Id. In its analysis, the court of appeals evaluated all the statistical evidence presented by Washington, giving substantial weight to absolute disparity because it is by far the most commonly employed measure in this context, with comparative disparity running a rather distant second. Id. at 163. The court of appeals decline[d] to give significant weight to the evidence regarding statistical significance given the aforementioned evidence of absolute disparity, comparative disparity, and absolute impact, as well as the limitations of statistical decision theory in this context. Id. at 164. The court of appeals disagreed with the expert's assertion that the percentages of African-Americans and Hispanics in Arapahoe County's population are too small to allow for meaningful evaluation using measures other than statistical significance. Id. Hence, the court of appeals rejected the expert's opinion that any exclusion of African-Americans or Hispanics from jury panels in Arapahoe County was statistically significant. Id. Because it determined that the underrepresentation of African-Americans and Hispanics on Arapahoe County's jury panels at the time of Washington's trial was not constitutionally significant, the court of appeals did not address whether the underrepresentation was caused by systematic exclusion or whether the practice of giving double credit to prospective jurors for service in Aurora municipal court served a significant state interest. Id.