Opinion ID: 1244833
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 15

Heading: Effects of Death-Qualification Process on Qualified Jurors

Text: One year after Moore, I wrote the opinion of this court in a case rejecting the related argument, brought under the Utah Constitution, that regardless of the effect of excluding a particular type of juror, the questioning involved in the process of death qualification itself inevitably directs the empaneled jury's attention prematurely to the penalty phase, thereby eroding the defendant's presumption of innocence. See State v. Shaffer, 725 P.2d 1301, 1309-12 (Utah 1986). In Shaffer, we dismissed the only major study that examines the effects of the death-qualification questioning on jurors because of the limited value to a single empirical study, id. at 1311, and because the side effects of death-qualification voir dire could be minimized by individual sequestered voir dire, id. at 1312. As in Moore, we again made a factual assumption (about the impact of sequestered voir dire) without the benefit of any empirical support and in the face of uncontradicted, albeit limited, empirical data that demonstrated prejudicial side effects. Because of this unsupported assumption, I would revisit the Shaffer opinion today in response to Young's argument: I would consider the combined effect on the conviction-proneness of death-qualified juries of voir dire questioning itself and the exclusion from the jury of WEs and ADPs. The original study before us in Shaffer, now published, confirmed what is intuitively plausible: the process of death qualification, despite any admonitions from the court to the contrary, may lead jurors who survive it to expect to convict the defendant and to assume that the real issue will pertain to the penalty. See Craig Haney, On the Selection of Capital Juries: The Biasing Effects of the Death-Qualification Process, 8 L. & Hum.Behav. 121 (1984). In a separate report, Haney went on to consider the cumulative impact of this process effect in addition to the prejudice created by excluding potential jurors. He concluded that the process of subjecting death-qualified jurors to exhaustive questioning prior to trial about the circumstances under which they would sentence a convicted murderer to death compounds the conviction-proneness already created by excluding jurors not death qualified. See Craig Haney, Examining Death Qualification: Further Analysis of the Process Effect, 8 L. & Hum.Behav. 133, 151 (1984). Furthermore, despite what I said for the court in Shaffer, neither intuitive nor empirical reason suggests that sequestered voir dire can or will eliminate or minimize this danger. In fact, it seems equally plausible that sequestered voir dire will increase the risk, because unsequestered voir dire may best assure that the jurors will have the opportunity to internalize the hypothetical character of the death-qualification questioning. In unsequestered questioning, jurors will hear the cautionary instruction regarding the defendant's presumption of innocence numerous times, as it is repeated with each juror, while sequestered jurors will hear it only once or twice. Sequestered jurors also will lack an opportunity to contemplate this instruction and the purpose of the death-qualification process generally over an extended and comparatively relaxed period while they watch the court examine other individuals.