Court Opinion

ID: 9482509
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:52:30.751601+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:02.480799
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the majority opinion. In view of the final paragraph of the dissent, however, I would like to add this: Nowhere in the majority opinion can I discern any intimation at all that the panel which decided Booker v. Jabe, 775 F.2d 762 (6th Cir.1985), “engaged in a patently lawless procedural practice” or “did not follow their charge to uphold the principles of the Constitution.” I do not believe that the Booker panel intended to do any such thing.
On the contrary, the Booker panel expressly recognized that “our authority as an intermediate court is limited,” id. at 767 — and for that reason, even though it disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision in Swain v. Alabama, 380 U.S. 202, 85 S.Ct. 824, 13 L.Ed.2d 759 (1965), the Booker panel held that the prosecutor’s use of peremptory challenges to excuse prospective jurors on the basis of their race, “although egregious conduct, did not violate the Equal Protection Clause as interpreted in Swain.” Booker, 775 F.2d at 767. These are obviously not the words of a lawless or unprincipled court.
At the time Booker was decided, there was no Supreme Court precedent expressly foreclosing the conclusion that the Sixth Amendment prohibits the exclusion of cognizable groups from the petit jury through peremptory challenges. The Booker panel thus felt free to conclude that the Sixth Amendment does prohibit such exclusion— and the panel presented about as able an argument in support of this view as one could imagine, given the circumstances to which the Supreme Court was subsequently to allude in Holland v. Illinois, 493 U.S. 474, 110 S.Ct. 803, 107 L.Ed.2d 905 (1990). This branch of the holding in Booker was no more the act of a renegade court than the first branch was.
It is indisputable, nonetheless, that the second branch of the holding in Booker cannot be reconciled with what, as we now know, the Supreme Court believes the Sixth Amendment has always said. As a panel of an intermediate court, we are no *403less bound by Holland than the Booker panel was bound by Swain.
Here are some of the things that Holland tells us about what the Supreme Court thinks the proper bounds of the Sixth Amendment have always been:
“A prohibition upon the exclusion of cognizable groups through peremptory challenges has no conceivable basis in the text of the Sixth Amendment, is without support in our prior decisions, and would undermine rather than further the constitutional guarantee of an impartial jury-
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[T]o say that the Sixth Amendment deprives the State of the ability to ‘stack the deck’ in its favor is not to say that each side may not, once a fair hand is dealt, use peremptory challenges to eliminate prospective jurors belonging to groups it believes would unduly favor the other side. Any theory of the Sixth Amendment leading to that result is implausible. The tradition of peremptory challenges for both the prosecution and the accused was already venerable at the time of Blackstone ... was reflected in a federal statute enacted by the same Congress that proposed the Bill of Rights ... was recognized in an opinion by Justice Story to be part of the common law of the United States ... and has endured through two centuries in all the States.... The constitutional phrase ‘impartial jury’ must surely take its content from this unbroken tradition.
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The rule we announce today is not only the only plausible reading of the text of the Sixth Amendment, but we think it best furthers the Amendment’s central purpose as well. Although the constitutional guarantee runs only to the individual and not to the State, the goal it expresses is jury impartiality with respect to both contestants: neither the defendant nor the State should be favored. This goal, it seems to us, would positively be obstructed by a petit jury cross-section requirement which ... would cripple the device of the peremptory challenge.
Since only the Sixth Amendment claim, and not the equal protection claim, is at issue, the question before us is not whether the defendant has been unlawfully discriminated against ... or whether the excluded jurors have been unlawfully discriminated against ... but whether the defendant has been denied the right to ‘trial ... by an impartial jury.’ The earnestness of this Court’s commitment to racial justice is not to be measured by its willingness to expand constitutional provisions designed for other purposes beyond their proper bounds.” Holland v. Illinois, 493 U.S. 474, 478-488, 110 S.Ct. 803, 806-811, 107 L.Ed.2d 905, passim (citations and footnote omitted, emphasis in original).
The Supreme Court having told us (1) that Holland represents “the only plausible reading of the text of the Sixth Amendment,” (2) that a reading such as that adopted in the second branch of Booker “has no conceivable basis in the text of the Sixth Amendment,” (3) that the latter reading is “without support in the [Supreme Court’s] prior decisions,” (4) that it cannot be reconciled with our “unbroken tradition” of peremptory challenges, and (5) that such a reading “would undermine the constitutional guarantee of an impartial jury,” it is simply inconceivable to me that the Supreme Court could have thought it was establishing “a new rule of criminal procedure” in Holland, thereby making it proper for the second branch of Booker to be applied in cases such as the one now before us. The language of Holland is “clear, direct, and unequivocal,” see Booker, 775 F.2d at 767, quoting McCray v. Abrams, 750 F.2d 1113, 1124 (2d Cir.1984), and in my view it rules out any possibility of our saying that Holland represents a “new rule.” Whether we agree with Holland or not, I think we are obliged to follow its rationale.