Court Opinion

ID: 9574911
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:09:31.845859+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:47:24.471642
License: Public Domain

GOULD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
The majority makes new and ill-advised doctrine on a matter that is properly resolved with a remand, after which the district court could honor the procedures required by Batson. The new rule adopted by the majority — that a Batson challenge will fail if the prosecutor says he or she does not recognize the struck juror as a minority — is inconsistent with the reasoning at the heart of Batson. This ill-advised rule evades and short circuits the evidence-producing process that trial courts implementing Batson need and have necessarily used to determine the existence of discriminatory intent, and that appellate courts likewise need fairly to review a Batson claim on appeal. Batson requires that the prosecutor offer a reason for a strike and that thereafter the district court make a finding whether the strike was a case of intentional discrimination, outlawed by Batson and inimical to the best interests of our society, or was made for a bona fide and legitimate reason. Because the majority’s rule lets the prosecutor veto the entire and well-constructed Batson process merely by saying “I didn’t think race was involved,” I must respectfully dissent.
I
The three-step Batson inquiry is a tool for producing the evidence necessary to the difficult task of “ferreting out discrimination in selections discretionary by nature.” See Miller-El v. Dretke (Miller-El II), 545 U.S. 231, 238, 125 S.Ct. 2317, 162 L.Ed.2d 196 (2005). A prosecutor is unlikely to admit candidly to striking a juror because of race. Batson recognized this, prohibiting the prosecutor from rebutting a Batson challenge “merely by denying that he had a discriminatory motive or affirming his good faith in making individual selections.” Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 98, 106 S.Ct. 1712, 90 L.Ed.2d 69 *1065(1986) (internal quotation marks and alterations omitted). The Batson Court observed, “If these general assertions were accepted as rebutting a defendant’s prima facie case, the Equal Protection Clause ‘would be but a vain and illusory requirement.’ ” Id. (quoting Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587, 598, 55 S.Ct. 579, 79 L.Ed. 1074 (1935)).
The logic of the Batson Court’s step-two discussion applies equally to the prima facie determination at step one. A general assertion that the prosecutor did not recognize a juror as a minority should not halt the Batson inquiry. Rather, the trial court must consider “all relevant circumstances” to determine whether an inference of purposeful discrimination arises. Id. at 96, 106 S.Ct. 1712. The relevant circumstances are many. Courts consider the percentages and order of minority strikes as compared to non-minority strikes. See, e.g., Miller-El II, 545 U.S. at 240-41, 125 S.Ct. 2317; Paulino v. Castro, 371 F.3d 1083, 1090-92 (9th Cir.2004); Wade v. Terhune, 202 F.3d 1190, 1198 (9th Cir.2000). The prosecutor’s statements and questions during jury selection are also relevant. Batson, 476 U.S. at 97, 106 S.Ct. 1712. An inference of discrimination could arise if minority jurors are questioned especially closely, or conversely if they are largely ignored. See Fernandez v. Roe, 286 F.3d 1073, 1079 (9th Cir.2002). The same is true where a prosecutor poses markedly different questions to minority and non-minority jurors. Miller-El II, 545 U.S. at 254-63, 125 S.Ct. 2317. A corollary source of evidence is the answers that jurors give. Where “nothing in the struck juror’s voir dire responses intimated a legitimate basis for removal,” it is more likely that the defendant will meet the “quite low” step-one threshold. Boyd v. Newland, 467 F.3d 1139, 1145, 1147 (9th Cir .2006).
Analytical tools are useful at step one because they can reveal the possibility of an unspoken discriminatory motive. The majority indicates that it seeks to evaluate all the circumstances, but the majority employs none of these analytical tools, indeed it cannot do so fully in light of the state of the record, relying instead solely on the prosecutor’s and judge’s impressions of Juror No. 12’s race.1 While the prosecutor’s avowal of ignorance of a stricken juror’s race might be one appropriate consideration at step one, see Fernandez, 286 F.3d at 1079, the purpose behind the step-one inquiry is to develop evidence about the prosecutor’s true motives, admitted or not.2 The trial judge must weigh all the evidence at step one, and make findings of fact, so that a reviewing court can marshal *1066virtually centuries of appellate experience in reviewing whether a fact finding was supported by the evidence. We should not turn Batson’s first step into a hollow exercise by allowing one piece of evidence — the prosecutor’s claimed perception of a juror’s race — to control, and thereby to sidestep all other tools, including a factual finding by the trial judge, that properly bear on whether discrimination was afoot.
II
My second ground for disagreeing with the majority’s holding is that it makes appellate review in cases like this one difficult or impossible. There is no sensible method for reviewing, on a cold record, a prosecutor’s subjective statement that he did not notice a prospective juror’s race. The majority takes some comfort from the fact that the trial judge shared the prosecutor’s confusion about Juror No. 12’s race, but the trial judge’s perception about whether Juror No. 12 was a minority is equally unreviewable. How can we meaningfully evaluate, on appeal, whether Juror No. 12 “looked like” a minority, such that the prosecutor’s claim not to recognize her race should be questioned? Should we require the appellate record to include photographs of the venirepersons? Must photographs be in color, or be of a certain type and quality? Are we to examine the prospective juror’s surnames for evidence of ethnic heritage? If the prosecutor and trial judge agree that a juror is not a minority, is that always to be the end of the inquiry? Does this majority view make sense? Respectfully, I think not.
We are past the point as a society where minority-group membership properly can turn on the mere observational say so of a participant in the judicial process. If we as judges peer out into our crowded courtrooms, or if we as people observe others in the street or shops or businesses, are we really able to say who has a minority heritage and who has not by our observation? The whole point of Batson is that minority status can’t be taken into account in jury selection when exercising peremptory challenges. A person with a minority heritage may bring valuable perspective to the fact-finding process, and that is so whether or not the prospective juror “looks like” a minority to the prosecutor or trial judge.3
The practical difficulties introduced by the majority’s holding are demonstrated by the facts of this case. The trial judge and prosecutor apparently did not recognize Juror No. 12’s minority status, and that may well have been true. But the defense attorney clearly did recognize the juror as being a member of a minority; he referred to her as a “person of color.” That he did so recognize the potential juror as a minority is absolutely clear from the fact that he raised a Batson objection to her being struck from the jury. Other evidence of Juror No. 12’s minority status, available to the district court at the time of the strike, was Juror No. 12’s self-identification as a Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander on her questionnaire. If the juror identified herself as a minority, and the defense attorney independently recognized that fact, these are two important reasons to think that the prosecutor conceivably might have recognized it, too. That is why *1067the step three process should have been fully engaged with a factual determination by the trial court to resolve this matter.
I would credit the juror’s self-identification as a Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander on her questionnaire, which the district court reviewed during the lunch recess. The prosecutor and judge’s joint error about Juror No. 12’s race thus revealed, the district court should have simply resumed and completed the familiar Batson steps.
III
My final point of disagreement with the majority regards the proper reading of the record below. I would not read this record creatively, as the majority has, to contain any “rulfing] ... that defense counsel had failed to state a prima facie case” at step one. See Maj. Op. at 1063. One can search high and search low in every word uttered by the district court on this issue. Nowhere did the district court ever mention a “prima facie” case and suggest expressly or by implication, as the majority holds, that the defense counsel didn’t present a “prima facie” case. I would call the abbreviated proceeding below what it was: a Batson hearing that was unmoored from the three-step process and that contained no findings at all.4
When the defense attorney raised the Batson objection, Batson’s procedures required the district court to determine whether the circumstances of the strike raised an inference of discrimination. Bat-son, 476 U.S. at 95, 106 S.Ct. 1712. The district court skipped step one, however, and jumped to step two by asking the prosecutor, “What were you looking at?” in striking Juror No. 12. After the prosecutor gave his response at step two that Juror No. 12 had a relation to law enforcement and a nephew with criminal convictions, the district court stated, “I think we’re ready to bring the jury in.” The Batson inquiry thus abruptly ended without a ruling at step three.
It is a well-settled rule in this circuit that once the trial court reaches step two, the court “must always reach step three, because it is not until step three of the Batson process that the court ‘determines whether the opponent of the strike has carried his burden of proving purposeful discrimination.’ ” Paulino, 542 F.3d at 702 (quoting Yee v. Duncan, 463 F.3d 893, 898 (9th Cir.2006)); see also Green v. LaMarque, 532 F.3d 1028, 1031 (9th Cir.2008) (reversing the denial of a habeas petition where the state court “failed to reach step three in the Batson analysis”); United States v. Alanis, 335 F.3d 965, 967 (9th Cir.2003) (emphasizing that the trial court has a “duty to proceed to step three”). Wdiile the majority assures us that its decision is consistent with this rule, it does not explain how. To state my perspective simply: The district court went to step two by inquiring after the prosecutor’s reasons for the strike, but having done so, the district court did not correctly follow through by making a finding at step three as to whether there was or was not purposeful discrimination. As applied here, in my view our precedent required that the trial court also reach step three.
Where the trial court prematurely ends the Batson process, the proper remedy is *1068a remand for an evidentiary hearing so that complete findings can be made. See, e.g., United States v. Collins, 551 F.3d 914, 923 (2009) (remanding for completion of the Batson steps); United States v. Esparza-Gonzalez, 422 F.3d 897, 906 (9th Cir. 2005) (same); Fernandez, 286 F.3d at 1079-80 (same). I would remand this case for the district court to answer the “critical question” of whether the prosecutor’s justifications for striking Juror No. 12 are persuasive or are instead a pretext for purposeful discrimination. See Miller-El v. Cockrell, 537 U.S. 322, 338-39, 123 S.Ct. 1029, 154 L.Ed.2d 931 (2003). If the district court is able sensibly to make step-three findings using the record, testimony from the attorneys, and the court’s own recollection about this case, that might be a simple way to resolve the Batson procedural error. I therefore think a remand is the appropriate remedy. If, on remand, the district court has insufficient direct or circumstantial evidence to conduct the step-three analysis, I would direct it to vacate Guerrero’s conviction and grant him a new trial because of the high import of enforcing the rule that the Supreme Court established in Batson. See United States v. Alcantar, 897 F.2d 436, 440 (9th Cir. 1990); United States v. Thompson, 827 F.2d 1254,1262 (9th Cir.1987).

. Given the written strike system used here, the timing of the Batson objection sheds no light on the presence or absence of discriminatory intent on the part of the prosecutor. The members of the jury were announced after the clerk compiled the written challenges. "The pattern of the prosecution's peremptory challenges might not have been apparent until the jury was selected, so the objection could not ... have been raised much earlier.” United States v. Thompson, 827 F.2d 1254, 1257 (9th Cir.1987) (rejecting a tardy-objection argument made by the government in response to a Batson challenge). Here, the government did not challenge the timeliness of the Batson objection.

. In Fernandez, we were skeptical of "the prosecutor's claim that he did not know the ethnicity of the prospective jurors” because “their [Hispanic] surnames appeared on the [juror] questionnaires.” 286 F.3d at 1079. In finding that the defendant had made out a prima facie case of discrimination, the court noted that it may not be proper to consider the prosecutor's explanations for strikes at step one. Id. Even if a prosecutor’s claim not to have noticed a juror’s race can be considered at step one, it still must be considered alongside all the other relevant circumstances, as it was in Fernandez. Id. at 1078-80.

. It is interesting that as long ago as 1879, in Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303, 312, 25 L.Ed. 664 (1879), even in the aftermath of Reconstruction and with widespread antipathy toward blacks, the United States Supreme Court recognized that a law barring blacks from juries was invalid. In doing so, the Court in part emphasized that the civil rights of the black defendants were at stake, not merely the political rights of the excluded jurors. See, e.g., Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality 40 (2004).

. While there was no express finding at any level, one might think that when the district court asked the prosecutor for reasons for making a strike, that indicates the district court had implicitly decided that a prima facie case was made sufficient for step one. Then, having proceeded to step two, the district court should have completed the process by assessing the answers given and making a finding of fact on whether a peremptory strike was tainted by discrimination.