Court Opinion

ID: 9788506
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 00:55:25.367966+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:37:11.555218
License: Public Domain

MARTONE, Justice,
dissenting.
I.
¶ 37 Before 1995, Rule 18.5(d), Ariz. R.Crim. P., provided:
The court shall conduct the voir dire examination, putting to the jurors all appropriate questions requested by counsel. The court may in its discretion examine one or more jurors apart from the other jurors.
If good cause appears, the court may permit counsel to examine an individual juror.
¶ 38 It was thus plain that under our former rule, the trial judge conducted voir dire in criminal cases and could, but need not, allow counsel to participate. Thus, had this case been tried under the former rule, even the majority would concede that there was no error.
¶ 39 In 1995, we amended Rule 18.5 in order to harmonize it with civil practice. We gave the parties a limited right to engage in oral voir dire. The rule begins by stating that “[t]he court shall conduct a thorough oral examination of prospective jurors.” This is consistent with the criminal practice under former Rule 18.5 in that the judge, not counsel, is the laboring oar in voir dire. In order to harmonize the civil rule with the criminal, we simultaneously amended Rule 47(b)(2), Ariz. R. Civ. P., by deleting the word “preliminary,” and replacing it with the word “thorough.”
¶ 40 The next sentence of Rule 18.5(d), as amended in 1995, states that “[u]pon the request of any party, the court shall permit that party a reasonable time to conduct a further oral examination of the prospective jurors.” (emphasis added). This changed Arizona criminal practice and gave, for the first time, a party a right to engage in oral voir dire. But it limited that right to “a further oral examination.” Well, “further” in connection with what? From the text, it is plain that it is “further” than the trial court’s “thorough oral examination” in the immediately preceding sentence. As stated in the report of the State Bar, “[ujnder such proposal lawyers, both civil and criminal, will be allowed to supplement the court’s voir dire on whatever non-duplicative matters are left. With an adequate voir dire by the trial judge, lawyers should not have too much left to cover.” State Bar Civil Practice and Procedure Committee, Report to the Arizona State Board of Governors RE Petitions R-94-0031 and R-92-0004 Jury Reform Proposals, at 9 (Apr. 7,1995).
¶ 41 Thus, a party’s right to further oral examination of the prospective jurors is limited to the class of prospective jurors that has already been the subject of the court’s thorough oral examination. It does not extend to those prospective jurors to whom a written questionnaire was given unless those jurors are orally examined by the judge. This reading is confirmed by the last sentence in Rule 18.5(d) which states “[njothing in this Rule shall preclude the use of written questionnaires to be completed by the prospective jurors, in addition to oral examination.” This was intended to leave in place then existing written questionnaire practices, unaffected by the new right to party oral voir dire.
¶42 Judges use written questionnaires to prescreen jurors in cases in which there might be problems, for example, cases in which there is massive pretrial publicity or cases that are likely to take an extended *328period of time to try. The judge can give such a questionnaire to the jury commissioner who in turn will give the questionnaire to hundreds of prospective jurors. Thereafter, the judge can review the questionnaires with counsel and exclude persons based upon the answers. The judge can then call to the courtroom only those jurors who do not have identifiable problems. It is that panel that will be subject to the judge’s thorough oral examination and it is that panel that the party has a right to further oral examination. The benefit of this procedure is that court and counsel will orally voir dire, say, 50 jurors rather than 200.
¶ 43 In contrast, the majority says that our case law and Rule 18.5 give a party the right to rehabilitate prospective jurors whose answers on the written questionnaires are problematic. Ante, at ¶ 14. Our case law says no such thing. We have no cases on the subject and the only case cited by the majority is a court of appeals opinion that simply does not address the question of a written questionnaire. Nor is there anything in Rule 18.5 that gives a party a right to attempt to rehabilitate answers on a written questionnaire. The rule only gives a party the right to orally examine jurors that the judge has already orally examined. And obviously the trial judge need not orally examine all the persons to whom the written questionnaire is given, or else the written questionnaire can never be used as a prescreening device.1
¶ 44 The extension of Rule 18.5 to give a party an absolute right to orally examine every prospective juror to whom a written questionnaire has been given, will, I believe, discourage trial judges from using written questionnaires at all. If they cannot be used to reduce the size of a panel to a manageable level without the complexity of party oral voir dire, why (from a judicial perspective) use them at all?
II.
¶45 Even if one could assume that our 1995 amendment to Rule 18.5 intended today’s result, I do not believe that denying a party an opportunity to rehabilitate a prospective juror could ever be structural error, unless it was error for the trial judge to have excluded the juror in the first place. But the assumption underlying today’s decision is that the affected jurors’ answers to question 9(B) of the written questionnaire, if final, were such that their excusal “did not violate the rule of Witherspoon and Morgan." Ante, at ¶ 8. The trial judge could believe the jurors when they said that they could not set aside their views on the death penalty, impartially weigh the evidence in the case, and return a verdict in accordance with the law. Id. The judge may, but need not, attempt to rehabilitate prospective jurors. Thus it was not error for the trial judge to exclude these jurors based upon their answers. It, therefore, cannot be structural error for these jurors to have been excluded.
¶ 46 Nor is there any suggestion that this defendant was tried by anything but a fair and impartial jury. We thus have an anomalous result in which a peculiar reading of an amended rule of criminal procedure results in structural error in a case in which the trial judge did not err in excluding the jurors.
¶ 471 therefore respectfully dissent.

. Thus, the judge does not, as the majority claims, ante, at ¶¶ 15, 23, violate Rule 18.5 when he chooses not to orally examine all the prospective jurors to whom a written questionnaire is given.