Court Opinion

ID: 9558423
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 17:09:22.024163+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:09:13.072473
License: Public Domain

COATS, Chief Judge,
dissenting.
In my view, this court’s decision conflicts with the supreme court’s position in Alvarado v. State,1 which was decided nearly 30 years ago. In Alvarado, the supreme court condemned the practice of taking a defendant from a small rural community where his crime allegedly occurred and moving him to a large city and selecting a jury which represented an urban population rather than representing a fair cross section of the rural community where the crime was committed. We summarized the Alvarado case in Erick v. State as follows:
In Alvarado, a native defendant who was a resident of Chignik was charged with a rape allegedly committed in Chignik. He was tried over his objections in Anchorage by a jury which was selected from within 15 miles of Anchorage. In reversing Alvarado’s conviction, the court emphasized the difference between Chignik, a remote native village approximately 450 miles from Anchorage, and the city of Anchorage. The court held that Alvarado was not provided with an impartial jury. The court said, “[W]e ... hold ... that an individual should not be forced, against his will, to stand trial before a jury which hás been selected in such a manner as to exclude a significant element of the population of the community in which the crime was allegedly committed.”2
In Alvarado, the supreme court recognized that carrying out its decision could entail considerable expense and inconvenience. But the supreme court concluded that the importance of the right to be tried by a jury which was representative of the place where the alleged crime occurred was of paramount importance:
It is of paramount importance that the benefits conferred by the Constitutions of the United States and Alaska be extended with an even hand to the people of our state. When a large segment of the population lives in towns and villages scattered throughout the regions of the state, we cannot afford to succumb to the temptation of convenience by allowing the machinery of justice to become inflexibly entrenched within the enclaves of our major cities. *535Instead we must tailor our system of justice to meet the needs of the people. It is our judicial system which must take the initiative to assure compliance with the mandates of the constitution; we cannot simply neglect or ignore communities of individuals located in remote areas of the state. Justice must be made available to all of the people of Alaska.3
In Erick, we specifically recognized the difficulties of selecting a jury in Fort Yukon but recognized that the Alvarado decision required courts to overcome these difficulties in order to make justice available to all the people in Alaska:
We appreciate the difficulties of obtaining a jury in communities such as Fort Yukon, where the record indicates that potential jurors are frequently related to or friends of parties, and where many of the potential jurors will have information about the case which disqualifies them as jurors. We also appreciate that there are frequently severe problems of communication, transportation, and availability of suitable facilities which make it difficult to hold a jury trial in such an area. The record shows that all of these problems were present in Erick’s case. However, these problems are typical of the problems which result from the attempts of the court system to comply with the mandates of Alvarado, that “[jjustice must be available to all of the people of Alaska.”4
In Erick, we concluded that the state had the burden to show that it was not reasonable to obtain a jury from the area that had been selected for trial.
We believe that the policies of Alvarado dictate that we place the burden upon the state to show that it was not reasonable to obtain a jury of twelve in the Fort Yukon area once that area had been selected as the site for the trial.5
In Erick, we concluded that the record did not demonstrate that the state had met the burden of showing that it was not reasonable to obtain a jury of twelve from the Fort Yukon area. We relied on the fact that the trial court was apparently unaware that it could have obtained the names of many more potential jurors on short notice through a master -jury list.6 We noted that, had the court been aware of the names of more jurors, it could have telephoned perspective jurors from the list,7 an emergency method of contacting jurors which the supreme court approved in Calantas v. State.8 In Erick, although we concluded that the trial court had not made reasonable efforts to obtain a jury in Fort Yukon, we noted that the trial court gave the defendant the option to have his case tried by seven jurors empaneled in Fort Yukon or, to have his case tried in Fairbanks before those seven jurors, supplemented by additional jurors selected in Fairbanks.9 We indicated that if the court had made reasonable efforts to obtain a jury in Fort Yukon and failed, that we would have upheld the court’s ruling forcing Erick to elect between being tried by these seven jurors in Fort Yukon or having the jury pool supplemented by jurors from Fairbanks:
Assuming reasonable efforts were made to select a jury for Erick and those efforts failed, we do not believe that the trial court would be precluded from requiring Erick to choose between a trial in front of seven jurors selected from Fort Yukon or having the seven Fort Yukon jurors supplemented from Fairbanks.10
Against this legal background, it appears to me that the manner in which Ward’s jury was selected violated his right to an impartial jury as set out in the Alvarado case. Ward was a Fort Yukon resident. The incident which led to the charges against Ward occurred in Fort Yukon. Yet the court forced Ward to try his case in Fairbanks before an *536urban jury, rather than in Fort Yukon before a jury representative of that area.
It is clear from the record that the state wanted to try the case in Fairbanks. The state opposed trying the case in Fort Yukon in the first place, opposed most of the court’s efforts to supplement the jury, made frequent motions during jury selection to move the trial to Fairbanks and exercised essentially all of its peremptory challenges. By contrast, Ward clearly wanted the case tried in Fort Yukon. Ward constantly insisted on being tried in Fort Yukon, kept asking the court to take action to supplement the jury pool, and exercised few peremptory challenges. As a result of the state’s effort, Ward was “forced, against his will, to stand trial before a jury which had been selected in such a manner as to exclude a significant element of the population of the community in which the crime was allegedly committed.” 11
In the first place, I have some question about whether the court used reasonable efforts to obtain all the jurors which it could have from Fort Yukon. The defendant asked the court to attempt to supplement the jury panel by having the court clerk telephone potential jurors. The court rejected his suggestion, finding that telephoning jurors was not a sufficiently random method to obtain jurors. But the supreme court specifically approved this method of bringing in supplemental jurors in Calantas12 and we have relied on Calantas in suggesting this method of obtaining emergency jurors in Erick. 13 The record in the present case shows that, after the state had exercised its challenges for cause and peremptory challenges, that approximately ten jurors remained. Ward clearly was satisfied with these jurors. In light of the fact that the parties were close to selecting a jury in Fort Yukon, Ward’s contention that the court system did not exhaust all reasonable efforts to obtain a jury in Fort Yukon has merit in light of the importance of the right set out in Alvarado.
Certainly the trial court did make a substantial effort to obtain a jury in Fort Yukon. But even if I assume that the court’s efforts were reasonable, I fail to see why the trial court did not follow the procedure which we approved in Erick: to offer Ward the option of being tried by a jury of less than twelve selected from Fort Yukon or having those jurors supplemented with jurors from Fairbanks. This would have allowed Ward to have his trial in front of jurors which were representative of the community where the incident occurred. The record before us shows no justification for having Ward tried by a jury selected entirely from an-urban area.
I would accordingly reverse Ward’s conviction.

. 486 P.2d 891 (Alaska 1971).

. 642 P.2d 821, 823-24 (Alaska App.1982) (quoting Alvarado, 486 P.2d at 905) (footnote omitted).

. Alvarado, 486 P.2d at 905-6.

. Erick, 642 P.2d at 824 (quoting Alvarado, 486 P.2d at 906).

. Erick, 642 P.2d at 824.

. Id. at 826.

. Id.

. 599 P.2d 147, 149-50 (Alaska 1979).

. Erick, 642 P.2d at 823.

. Id. at 827 n. 11.

. Alvarado, 486 P.2d at 905.

. 599 P.2d at 149-50.

.Erick, 642 P.2d at 826.