Court Opinion

ID: 9492539
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:43:39.456919+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:21.522352
License: Public Domain

BOWMAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the Court’s disposition of this appeal. As the opinion of the Court explains, the peremptory challenge issue is governed by United States v. Cruz, 993 F.2d 164 (8th Cir.1993), and United States v. Horsman, 114 F.3d 822 (8th Cir.1997), cert. denied, — U.S. —, 118 S.Ct. 702, 139 L.Ed.2d 645 (1998). These cases have established the law of the Circuit. But even were we writing in this case on a clean slate, I would decide the case the same way. In my view, Cruz and Horsman accurately reflect the true relationship between denied challenges for cause and peremptory challenges.
Sithithongtham in fact exercised all ten of the peremptory challenges guaranteed him by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 24(b). He was tried and convicted by an impartial jury, one that did not include any of the jurors who arguably should have been dismissed for cause. Sithi-thongtham makes no claim that he suffered any actual prejudice. The use that *1125Sithithongtham made of three of his peremptory challenges — to exclude from the trial jury three potential jurors who Sithi-thongtham thought were biased, but who the trial judge thought could obey their oaths and whom the judge therefore refused to strike for cause — illustrates one of the main reasons for allowing peremptory challenges. I.e., even when the trial judge may be in error in declining to strike one or more potential jurors for cause, peremptory challenges are available to exclude those jurors and thus to assure exactly what Sithithongtham had here — a qualified and unbiased trial jury. The Supreme Court explicitly has recognized that, far from being a denial or impairment of the right, this is a proper use of peremptory challenges:
Indeed the very availability of peremp-tories allows counsel to ascertain the possibility of bias through probing questions on the voir dire and facilitates the exercise of challenges for cause by removing the fear of incurring a juror’s hostility through examination and challenge for cause.
Swain v. Alabama, 380 U.S. 202, 219-220, 85 S.Ct. 824, 13 L.Ed.2d 759 (1965) (emphasis added). Similarly, in Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 106 S.Ct. 1712, 90 L.Ed.2d 69 (1986), the Court observed that, “[w]hile the Constitution does not confer a right to peremptory challenges, those challenges traditionally have been viewed as one means of assuring the selection of a qualified and unbiased jury.” 476 U.S. at 91, 106 S.Ct. 1712 (emphasis added and citations omitted). Clearly, Sithithongtham used the three perempto-ries that are the focus of this appeal in a manner consistent with a fundamental purpose of the peremptory challenge—to help assure that each case is heard by a qualified and unbiased jury—and his right to the full exercise of his ten peremptory challenges was neither denied nor impaired.
Adoption of a rule contrary to the one we have applied to the peremptory challenge issue in this case could only result in a grave disservice to the administration of justice, with verdicts reached by juries after scrupulously fair and error-free trials being reversed for no better reason than that the defendant used one or more peremptory challenges to strike one or more potential jurors whom the trial judge, exercising his or her discretion, has declined to remove for cause. Were our Court to adopt such a rule, it would follow that whenever we would conclude that the district court erred in declining to strike a potential juror for cause, the defendant’s use of a peremptory challenge to remove that potential juror ipso facto would require reversal of the defendant’s conviction, even where, as here, the defendant is tried by a qualified and unbiased jury. Happily, this is not the law of our Circuit, and I would hope it never will be the rule by which we set our course.