Opinion ID: 490522
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the merits of roman's petition

Text: 58 In urging reversal of the judgment granting Roman's petition, the State contends principally that (1) recent Supreme Court decisions have invalidated McCray's Sixth Amendment analysis as a basis for review of the prosecution's exercise of peremptory challenges; (2) our holding in McCray, if still the law of this Circuit, should not be applied retroactively; (3) even if the McCray Sixth Amendment analysis remains viable, White persons should not be considered a cognizable group for purposes of such analysis; and (4) in light of the actual composition of the jury before which Roman was tried, his conviction should not be vacated. We find merit only in the last of these contentions. 59
60 This Court's decision in McCray v. Abrams was handed down in December 1984, at a time when Swain v. Alabama, 380 U.S. 202, 85 S.Ct. 824, 13 L.Ed.2d 759 (1965), was the prevailing law. In Swain, the Supreme Court had stated that it could not hold that the striking of Blacks, or of any group of otherwise qualified jurors, in any given case violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. 380 U.S. at 212, 221-22, 85 S.Ct. at 836-37. It held that, in order to establish that the prosecutor's use of peremptory challenges constituted a denial of equal protection, a defendant would have to show that the prosecutor 61 in case after case, whatever the circumstances, whatever the crime and whoever the defendant or the victim may be, is responsible for the removal of Negroes who have been selected as qualified jurors by the jury commissioners and who have survived challenges for cause, with the result that no Negroes ever serve on petit juries.... 62 Id. at 223, 85 S.Ct. at 837. In McCray, the district court had ruled that the state's use of its peremptory challenges in the McCray case alone violated both equal protection and the Sixth Amendment. We affirmed on Sixth Amendment grounds only. We concluded that Swain's ruling foreclosed an equal protection argument based on a prosecutor's discriminatory use of peremptory challenges in a single case, but that it did not foreclose review of the prosecutor's use of peremptory challenges under Sixth Amendment analysis, which had undergone considerable development--including the first ruling that the jury trial guarantee of that Amendment is applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment--in the years after Swain was decided. See McCray, 750 F.2d at 1124-31. 63 The Sixth Amendment provides, in pertinent part, that [i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury.... In McCray, we reviewed the Supreme Court's analysis of this provision in the context of such issues as the composition of the venire, the size of the petit jury, and the permissibility of less-than-unanimous verdicts, 750 F.2d at 1124-29, and concluded that the touchstone of the Court's analysis in each instance was whether the practice in question deprived the defendant of the possibility of a jury that represented a cross section of the community, id. at 1125. Noting that the petit jury must be drawn at random from the venire and that a random drawing is inconsistent with any guarantee of a particular resulting composition, we concluded that although the Sixth Amendment does not give the defendant the right to a petit jury of any particular composition, e.g., id. at 1128, it does protect him against the state's discriminatory use of peremptory challenges in such a way as to eliminate even the possibility that the petit jury could reflect a cross section of the community. 64 Finally, we set forth the factors we believed a defendant must show in order to establish a prima facie case that the prosecution had used its peremptory challenges in a way that violated the Sixth Amendment and the kind of showing that would be required for the state to rebut such a prima facie case. We stated that 65 in order to establish a prima facie violation of his right to the possibility of a fair cross section in the petit jury, the defendant must show that in his case, (1) the group alleged to be excluded is a cognizable group in the community, and (2) there is substantial likelihood that the challenges leading to this exclusion have been made on the basis of the individual venirepersons' group affiliation rather than because of any indication of a possible inability to decide the case on the basis of the evidence presented. 66 .... 67 In order to rebut the defendant's showing, the prosecutor need not show a reason rising to the level of cause. There are any number of bases on which a party may believe, not unreasonably, that a prospective juror may have some slight bias that would not support a challenge for cause but that would make excusing him or her desirable. Such reasons, if they appear to be genuine, should be accepted by the court, which will bear the responsibility of assessing the genuineness of the prosecutor's response and of being alert to reasons that are pretextual. 68 Id. at 1131-32. We remanded the case to the district court for a hearing, in order to give the state an opportunity to rebut the prima facie showing made by McCray. 69 The state petitioned the Supreme Court for certiorari in McCray, not contesting our ruling that the Sixth Amendment prohibited prosecutors from discriminating in the use of peremptory challenges, but arguing principally that the Sixth Amendment strictures should be extended to defendants as well as to prosecutors and that the state's previous explanations in the McCray matter should be accepted without need for a hearing. While this petition was pending, the Supreme Court decided Batson v. Kentucky. 70 In Batson, the Supreme Court overruled so much of Swain v. Alabama as had (1) presumed that a group-based exclusion was valid in any given case, and (2) held that the defendant could not establish a prima facie case of racial discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause unless he could show a pattern of such discrimination in the prosecutor's prior cases. The Batson Court ruled that a defendant may now make out a prima facie case of an equal protection violation based solely on the evidence concerning the prosecutor's use of peremptory challenges at the defendant's own trial. See 106 S.Ct. at 1722-24. The procedural framework adopted by the Court for evaluation of the defendant's equal protection claim was essentially the framework we had set out in McCray for evaluation of such a claim under the Sixth Amendment. See 106 S.Ct. at 1723-24. 71 Two months later, in Allen v. Hardy, --- U.S. ----, 106 S.Ct. 2878, 92 L.Ed.2d 199 (1986) (per curiam) (Allen), the Court ruled that Batson was not to be applied retroactively on collateral review of any conviction that had become final before the decision in Batson was announced. 106 S.Ct. at 2879-81. Final, in this context, meant that the judgment of conviction had been entered, all direct appeals had been exhausted, and the time to petition for certiorari had expired. Id. at 2880 & n. 1. After deciding Allen, the Court dealt with the petition for certiorari in McCray by vacating and remanding the case to this Court for further consideration in light of Batson and Allen. See Abrams v. McCray, --- U.S. ----, 106 S.Ct. 3289, 92 L.Ed.2d 705. After the remand, the parties stipulated that the state would withdraw its appeal. Our order approving this stipulation did not withdraw our McCray opinion, however, and we regard that opinion as stating the current law of this Circuit unless action of the Supreme Court dictates a contrary view. 72 We see nothing in the Supreme Court's remand in McCray that warrants our abandoning McCray's Sixth Amendment analysis. The Court had declined to address Batson's Sixth Amendment argument, see Batson, 106 S.Ct. at 1716 n. 4, and it did not express a view as to McCray's Sixth Amendment analysis. Nor did the Court mention its then-recent decision in Lockhart v. McCree, 476 U.S. 162, 106 S.Ct. 1758, 90 L.Ed.2d 137 (1986) (Lockhart ), a Sixth Amendment case, as bearing on our further consideration in McCray. We see no basis for inferring that the Court's remand meant that a prosecutor's allegedly discriminatory use of peremptory challenges could be analyzed only under the Equal Protection Clause and not under the Sixth Amendment. Had that been what the Court intended, it could simply, in light of Batson and Allen, have reversed McCray, for it was clear from the record and doubtless well known to the Court that McCray's conviction had become final long prior to the Court's decision in Batson: Finality was achieved with the Supreme Court's 1983 denial of McCray's petition for certiorari from the New York Court of Appeals' decision affirming his conviction, a denial that was accompanied by concurring or dissenting opinions that were mentioned no fewer than six times in the various opinions in Batson. 73 Nor does the Court's Sixth Amendment decision in Lockhart cast doubt on the McCray analysis. Lockhart involved the permissibility of excluding prospective jurors who had certain views of the death penalty. The Court found no Sixth Amendment violation for several reasons, not the least of which was its view that the fair cross-section requirement was not intended to apply to persons grouped solely in terms of shared attitudes; the Court stated that such persons do not constitute  'distinctive groups' for fair cross-section purposes. 106 S.Ct. at 1765. In the course of its decision, the Lockhart Court noted that, because of the practical impossibility of providing each criminal defendant with a truly 'representative' petit jury, it had never invoked the fair cross-section principle to ... require petit juries, as opposed to jury panels or venires, to reflect the composition of the community at large. Id. at 1764-65. The Court stated that it remained convinced that an extension of the fair cross-section requirement to petit juries would be unworkable and unsound. Id. at 1765. The Sixth Amendment analysis of McCray is entirely consonant with the Supreme Court's observations on the limited reach of the fair cross-section requirement, for we explicitly acknowledged that, because the petit jurors are selected at random from the venire, the Sixth Amendment cannot give the defendant the right to a petit jury of any particular composition, 750 F.2d at 1128. The bottom line of McCray is that the Sixth Amendment guarantees only the possibility of a petit jury reflecting a cross section of the community and forbids the prosecutor to exercise his peremptories discriminatorily in a manner that eliminates that possibility. Nothing in Lockhart or any other Supreme Court decision of which we are aware undermines this analysis. 74 Finally, we note that when the Court vacated and remanded McCray, it took like action in Booker v. Jabe, 775 F.2d 762 (6th Cir.1985) (Booker I ), which likewise had ruled that the discriminatory use of peremptory challenges violated the Sixth Amendment. Although it was plain that Booker's 1975 conviction had become final prior to the decision in Batson, and one member of the Supreme Court felt that Booker I should simply have been reversed in light of Batson and Allen, see Michigan v. Booker, --- U.S. ----, 106 S.Ct. 3289, 3290, 92 L.Ed.2d 705 (1986) (Burger, C.J., dissenting), the matter was remanded for further consideration in light of those two cases. On remand, the Sixth Circuit adhered to its prior ruling under the Sixth Amendment, see Booker v. Jabe, 801 F.2d 871 (6th Cir.1986) (per curiam) (Booker II ), and the Supreme Court denied the state's petition for review of this adherence, see Michigan v. Booker, --- U.S. ----, 107 S.Ct. 910, 93 L.Ed.2d 860 (1987). While we are aware that the Court's denials of certiorari generally have, in principle, no precedential significance, see generally R. Stern & E. Gressman, Supreme Court Practice Secs. 4.31, 5.7 (5th ed. 1978); Linzer, The Meaning of Certiorari Denials, 79 Colum.L.Rev. 1227 (1979), the denial of review in Booker II certainly seems inconsistent with any view that the remands in McCray and Booker I were meant to foreclose adherence to our Sixth Amendment analysis. 75 In all the circumstances, we regard the Sixth Amendment analysis of McCray as remaining the law of this Circuit.
76 The State contends that, in light of the longstanding reliance of prosecutors and courts on the rule established by Swain v. Alabama, the Sixth Amendment analysis of McCray, since it invalidated practices that had seemed invulnerable in light of Swain, should not be applied retroactively. We reject this contention insofar as Roman's petition is concerned. 77 In United States v. Johnson, 457 U.S. 537, 549-51, 102 S.Ct. 2579, 2586-87, 73 L.Ed.2d 202 (1982), the Supreme Court had established the principle that new constitutional rules of criminal procedure announced by that Court would be applied retroactively to cases on direct review unless they constituted a clear break with past precedent in the sense that they explicitly overruled a past Supreme Court precedent, or disapproved a practice the Court arguably had sanctioned in prior cases, or overturned a longstanding practice that the lower courts had uniformly approved. If Johnson remained the controlling framework, the State's argument for the nonretroactive application of McCray might well have merit. In Griffith v. Kentucky, --- U.S. ----, 107 S.Ct. 708, 93 L.Ed.2d 649 (1987), however, the Court established a uniform rule that new constitutional rules of criminal procedure are to be given retroactive effect in any case, state or federal, in which the conviction had not become final--i.e., where the time for direct appeals or for a petition for certiorari to review the denial of such appeals had not expired--prior to the announcement of the new rule: 78 [A] new rule for the conduct of criminal prosecutions is to be applied retroactively to all cases, state or federal, pending on direct review or not yet final, with no exception for cases in which the new rule constitutes a clear break with the past. 79 107 S.Ct. at 716. 80 We see no reason why this principle should not be equally applicable to a circuit court decision that establishes a new constitutional standard of criminal procedure. See, e.g., White v. Maggio, 556 F.2d 1352, 1354-56 (5th Cir.1977) (applying to circuit court decision the principles prescribed by the Supreme Court for assessing the retroactivity of its own decisions); United States v. Walker, 569 F.2d 502, 503-04 (9th Cir.) (same), cert. denied, 435 U.S. 976, 98 S.Ct. 1625, 56 L.Ed.2d 70 (1978). Of the matters before us, Roman's appeal to the New York Court of Appeals on direct review of his conviction was decided after this Court announced its decision in McCray. Since his conviction thus had not become final prior to McCray, the McCray Sixth Amendment analysis may be applied retroactively to the jury selection proceedings at his trial. 81
82 The State's contention that White persons do not constitute a cognizable or distinctive group for Sixth Amendment purposes need not detain us long. Although the Supreme Court has declined to explore precisely the contours of cognizability, see Lockhart v. McCree, 106 S.Ct. at 1765, it has made it clear that the concept of 'distinctiveness' must be linked to the purposes of the fair cross-section requirement, which are 83 (1) guard[ing] against the exercise of arbitrary power and ensuring that the commonsense judgment of the community will act as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor, (2) preserving public confidence in the fairness of the criminal justice system, and (3) implementing our belief that sharing in the administration of justice is a phase of civic responsibility. 84 Id. (quoting Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 530-31, 95 S.Ct. 692, 697-98, 42 L.Ed.2d 690 (1975). 85 It is plain that the exclusion of entire racial groups from jury service for reasons wholly unrelated to the ability of the individuals to serve as jurors in a particular case is squarely within these parameters. Though such wholesale exclusion is more often practiced against minorities or traditionally disadvantaged members of society, the exclusion of groups normally in the majority is no less objectionable for it arbitrarily deprives that group of a share of the responsibility for the administration of justice, deprives the defendant of the possibility that his petit jury will reflect a fair cross section of the community, and gives every appearance of unfairness. 86 D. The Challenge to Chief Judge Brieant's Findings 87 After conducting a lengthy hearing at which, inter alia, the ADA testified as to his reasons for his peremptory challenges, Chief Judge Brieant found that the ADA had exercised those challenges deliberately to exclude White jurors solely because of their race, seeking to remove as many White prospective jurors as possible. Chief Judge Brieant found that the reasons adduced by Levin for his challenges were circumlocutory, trivial, childish, incredible, and designed to cover up the ADA's discriminatory intent. Judge Goettel, on the other hand, who did not conduct any evidentiary hearing in ruling on Schreiber's petition, expressed the view that the ADA's testimony was candid. The State urges that we reject the findings of Chief Judge Brieant and accept instead the finding of Judge Goettel. We decline to do so. 88 The findings of the trial court are to be upheld on appeal unless they are clearly erroneous. Anderson v. City of Bessemer City, N.C., 470 U.S. 564, 573-74, 105 S.Ct. 1504, 1511-12, 84 L.Ed.2d 518 (1985). Assessments of credibility of witnesses are peculiarly within the province of a trier of fact who has had an opportunity to view and hear the witnesses, and such assessments are entitled to considerable deference on review. Id. Plainly the district court's decision to disbelieve the testimony of a witness who has appeared before it must be respected where the evidence adduced supports that decision. 89 The evidence adduced at the evidentiary hearing on Roman's petition amply supports Chief Judge Brieant's rejection of the reasons offered by Levin as pretextual. Such general responses as lifestyle and background were properly rejected as inadequate statements of racially neutral reasons, given the prima facie case of discrimination established by Roman. Further, many of the offered explanations--e.g., the notion that knowledge of electronics, bookkeeping, and computers might prevent a person from accepting the reasonable doubt standard of proof, or that persons whose relatives had law enforcement jobs would identify with law enforcement officials and therefore vote against conviction--were on their face unworthy of belief. Moreover, though the law enforcement connection was used as an explanation for some of the challenges to White prospective jurors, some non-white prospective jurors with similar connections went unchallenged by the State. Finally, the ADA's withdrawal of one of his challenges rather than disclosing its basis, and the explanation offered for that withdrawal--i.e., that he was getting heat from the defense because of his persistent challenges to White jurors--were further evidence permitting the inference that the challenges were racially motivated. 90 The findings of Chief Judge Brieant that the ADA's proffered reasons were pretexts to disguise the racially discriminatory use of the State's peremptory challenges are thus not clearly erroneous and may not be set aside. The contrary finding of Judge Goettel, who did not conduct a hearing and did not view the witness's demeanor, is not entitled to deference. We conclude that Chief Judge Brieant correctly found that Roman established that the State had used most of its peremptory challenges to challenge White prospective jurors solely on the basis of their race. E. The Propriety of Habeas Relief 91 This conclusion does not, however, answer the ultimate question of whether Roman was entitled to have his conviction set aside. In assessing the propriety of habeas corpus relief, we are constrained to give some attention to the actual composition of the jury before which Roman was tried, for though the prosecutor acted improperly in attempting to eliminate Whites from the jury, he did not entirely succeed, and the jury actually came rather close to representing a fair cross section of the community in which the trial took place. 92 We return to the principle that what the Sixth Amendment guarantees to a defendant is not that he will have a petit jury of any particular composition but that he will have the possibility of a jury that reflects a fair cross section of the community. The prosecutor violates Sixth Amendment rights when he starts out to eliminate that possibility, and it is incumbent upon the trial judge to apply the McCray Sixth Amendment principles during the jury selection process, and to grant the defendant an appropriate remedy when a prima facie case has been made of the prosecutor's racially discriminatory use of peremptory challenges and the state has not successfully rebutted that case by presenting creditable race-neutral reasons for the challenges. If the judge fails to act and if the prosecutor has succeeded in excluding a cognizable group from the jury by the discriminatory use of his peremptory challenges, that constitutionally guaranteed possibility has been artificially eliminated, and the defendant's constitutional right has been impaired. In such a case, a defendant is entitled to have his conviction set aside and to receive a new trial. 93 Where, however, the actions of the prosecutor have not succeeded in excluding the targeted group and have not reduced the petit jury representatives of that group dramatically below the group's percentage in the venire or in the population of the community, it is difficult to see that the defendant has in fact been denied the possibility that the Sixth Amendment guaranteed him. Rather, if that group is not significantly underrepresented, it appears that the possibility constitutionally guaranteed to the defendant has come to fruition and that the defendant has therefore not been injured by the prosecutor's efforts to eliminate the cross-section possibility. 94 In the present case, these observations lead us to conclude that Roman's conviction should not have been set aside. The testimony at the hearing before Chief Judge Brieant indicated that, historically, as many as 75% of the members of the Bronx County jury panels might ordinarily be dark skinned. Here, the actual petit jury was 75% Black or Hispanic and 25% White. Nor was the composition of the jury radically different from that of the Bronx County population, 34% White, for had one more White been added to the jury, the percentage of Whites on the jury would almost precisely have matched their percentage in the community. 95 Further, it is arguable that the prosecution was not actually responsible for reducing the percentage of Whites on the jury below that of the community, for there were two White prospective jurors whom the ADA had not challenged but who were removed by the defendants. Had these two jurors been seated, and had the ADA challenged no Whites in addition to those he eventually did challenge (a highly speculative hypothesis on this record), the jury could have included five Whites, or 42%, a figure above the community population percentage and squarely within the normal range for Bronx County jury panels according to all of the witnesses who testified. In all the circumstances, we conclude that the presence on the jury of only three Whites instead of four did not mean that the jury did not comprise a fair cross section. 96 In sum, although a prosecutor's actions in challenging a group of prospective jurors because of their race are improper and are unfair to those jurors, these principles do not mandate a federal habeas court's vacation, on Sixth Amendment grounds, of a state conviction where, though the prosecutor has sought to skew the jury, the jury as empaneled reasonably approximates a cross section of the community. Though the prosecutor's actions are to be condemned, the defendant's conviction before a jury that was in fact a fair cross section should be allowed to stand.