Opinion ID: 490522
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Viability of McCray's Sixth Amendment Analysis After Batson

Text: 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.