Court Opinion

ID: 9493985
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:25:17.668307+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:08.728348
License: Public Domain

DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I agree wholeheartedly with the majority’s conclusion that the plaintiff, Rhodda Thompson, is entitled to a new trial on her Title VII claims because the district court permitted, Juror Letter to sit without obtaining the kind of unequivocal assurances of impartiality that are required to assure an unbiased trier of fact. Along the way toward reaching that conclusion, however, the majority expresses skepticism about the wisdom of the principle the Supreme Court articulated in United States v. Martinez-Salazar, 528 U.S. 304, 120 S.Ct. 774, 145 L.Ed.2d 792 (2000), to the effect that there is no rule compelling a defendant to use or to refrain from using a peremptory challenge on a particular basis, or when a particular set of facts is present. Id. at 314, 120 S.Ct. 774. Instead, the Court held, after the party has failed in an effort to convince the trial court to strike a juror for cause, that party has “the option of letting [the prospective juror] sit on the petit jury and, upon conviction, pursuing a Sixth Amendment challenge on appeal.” Id. at 315, 120 S.Ct. 774. Martinez-Salazar ultimately held that once a defendant has elected to use a peremptory challenge creatively, the only question that survives is whether the jury that actually sat was an unbiased one.
I do' not share the majority’s reservations about this rule, and I therefore support strongly the majority’s decision to reserve any exploration of this rule for another day (assuming for the sake of argument that the Supreme Court has left us any room in which to operate). In my opinion, there is much to commend in the system the Supreme Court sketched out. It is important to remember that no problem arises until the party has challenged a prospective juror for cause and the court has rejected the challenge. The district court thus cannot be sand-bagged into permitting a biased juror to sit. Once the court has ruled on all the challenges for cause, the lawyers representing both sides are left with an array of prospective ju*628rors. At that point, each lawyer must decide how best to use the allotted peremptory challenges. I see no way of second-guessing that choice at the appellate level. As the majority acknowledges, certain prospective jurors might not reveal enough information on the record to support a challenge for cause, and yet the lawyer might feel positive that these individuals would in fact be biased. Even with respect to the prospective jurors who were challenged unsuccessfully for cause, the chances that any of those decisions by the trial court amounted to reversible error are just that — chances—and the responsible lawyer cannot count on convincing an appellate court later that the ruling was in error. In the end, therefore, there would be no objective way to second-guess the lawyer’s decisions about the way her peremptory challenges were used. The Supreme Court’s Martinez-Salazar holding quite properly reflects this fact.
The one issue that I regard as more complex concerns a plaintiff who does not exhaust her peremptory challenges. That is not Thompson’s situation, but it occasionally happens that not all peremptories are used. If there are left-over perempto-ries and the plaintiff has failed to convince the court to strike a certain juror for cause, it is at least imaginable that a decision not to use an available peremptory challenge on that juror might amount to a waiver of the right to assert that the juror should not have sat. As I said, that is not this case. It is possible that there might be further complications in an actual case that I cannot envision at this time that would justify even this kind of strategic decision.
With this qualification, I concur in the court’s opinion.