Opinion ID: 784816
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Jury drawn from a fair cross-section of the community

Text: 52 Court is held at three locations in the Eastern Division of the Northern District of Ohio: Akron, Cleveland, and Youngstown. This case was heard in Akron. Criminal cases are randomly assigned to judges in the district, and the location of the judge determines the pool from which jurors are selected. Forest contends on appeal, as he did in the district court, that he was deprived of his Sixth Amendment right to a venire drawn from a fair cross-section of the community because African-Americans are systematically underrepresented in the pool of potential jurors who serve in Akron. Whether a defendant has been denied his right to a jury selected from a fair cross-section of the community is a mixed question of law and fact, which we review de novo.  United States v. Allen, 160 F.3d 1096, 1101 (6th Cir.1998). 53 The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed. This right to an impartial jury includes the right to a jury drawn from a fair cross section of the community. Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 526 & 530, 95 S.Ct. 692, 42 L.Ed.2d 690 (1975). As the Supreme Court has emphasized, however, there is no requirement that petit juries actually chosen must mirror the community. Id. at 538, 95 S.Ct. 692 (emphasis added). Defendants are not entitled to a jury of any particular composition, ... but the jury wheels, pools of names, panels or venires from which juries are drawn must not systematically exclude distinctive groups in the community and thereby fail to be reasonably representative thereof. Id. (citations omitted). 54 In order to establish a prima facie violation of the fair-cross-section requirement, a criminal defendant must show: 55 (1) that the group alleged to be excluded is a distinctive group in the community; 56 (2) that the representation of this group in venires from which juries are selected is not fair and reasonable in relation to the number of such persons in the community; and 57 (3) that under-representation is due to a systematic exclusion of the group in the jury selection process. 58 Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357, 364, 99 S.Ct. 664, 58 L.Ed.2d 579 (1979). 59 Forest claims that African-Americans are systematically excluded from Akron juries. The Supreme Court has recognized that African-Americans are a distinctive group in the community. Lockhart v. McCree, 476 U.S. 162, 175, 106 S.Ct. 1758, 90 L.Ed.2d 137 (1986) (citing African-Americans as an example of a distinctive group in the community). Forest can thus establish the first of the Duren factors. 60 This brings us to the second Duren factor, focusing on whether Forest has demonstrated that the representation of African-Americans on venires is not fair and reasonable in relation to the number of [African-Americans eligible for jury service] in the community. In the context of jury selection, one way to evaluate the fairness of representation is by calculating absolute disparity, which refers to the difference between the percentage of a certain population group eligible for jury duty and the percentage of that group who actually appear in the venire. United States v. Greene, 971 F.Supp. 1117, 1128 n. 11 (E.D.Mich.1997). 61 In the present case, Forest suggests two possible measures of absolute disparity. The first measure compares the percentage of African-Americans in the Eastern Division (13.7 percent) with the percentage who live in the counties that provide juries for the Akron court (8 percent), which produces an absolute disparity of 5.7 percent (13.7-8 = 5.7). A second way to measure the absolute disparity is to compare the percentage of African-Americans in the Eastern Division (13.7 percent) with the percentage on the venire (6.5 percent), which demonstrates an absolute disparity of 7.2 percent (13.7-6.5 = 7.2). 62 Neither measure can establish a constitutional violation, however, because both rely on the total percentage of African-Americans in the Eastern Division, rather than on the percentage who are eligible to serve on juries. Cases from both the Supreme Court and this court demonstrate that, when measuring absolute disparity, the appropriate comparison is between the percentage of group members who are eligible for jury service in the population as a whole and in the jury pool. See, e.g., Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. at 524, 95 S.Ct. 692 (comparing the percentage of women eligible for jury service in the community with the percentage of women in an average venire); Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. at 362-63, 99 S.Ct. 664 (comparing the percentage of adult women in the community with the percentage of women in an average venire); Ford v. Seabold, 841 F.2d 677, 683 (6th Cir.1988) (comparing the percentage of women 18 years or older in the community with the percentage of women in the jury pool). In the present case, Forest has presented no evidence regarding the percentage of African Americans in the Eastern Division who are eligible for jury service. His statistics that provide nothing more than the total African-American population of the Eastern Division are therefore insufficient to establish a prima facie case of a Sixth Amendment violation. 63