Court Opinion

ID: 9494392
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:37:00.103635+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:23.463695
License: Public Domain

*541NELSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I concur generally in Parts I and II of the court’s opinion, as well as in the first paragraph of Part IV, but I would reverse the dismissal of the death penalty notice on the ground that defendant Bass failed to make the threshold showing necessary for issuance of the discovery order he sought.
As Bass acknowledges in his brief, the racial disparities of which he complains “are generated primarily at the early stages of federal capital cases. * * * [T]he major problem seems to occur in the initial selection of cases for federal prosecution on capital-eligible charges.” The Department of Justice Statistical Survey on which Bass relies refutes any inference that the Attorney General — who is not required by Department of Justice procedures personally to authorize the bringing of capital-eligible cases — has been guilty of racial discrimination against African Americans. The survey shows that Attorney General Janet Reno personally authorized U.S. Attorneys to file death penalty notices against a higher percentage of white capital-eligible defendants (38 percent) than black capital-eligible defendants (25 percent).
Just as Bass is not challenging the personal bona fides of the Attorney General who authorized the filing of a death penalty notice in his case, as I understand it, he is not alleging that the office of the U.S. Attorney for the district where his case is pending — the Eastern District of Michigan — declined to negotiate a plea bargain with him because of his race. At bottom, rather, his quarrel seems to be with the decision of the U.S. Attorney’s Office to bring federal death-eligible charges against him in the first place. And he cannot prevail on this point, ultimately, without demonstrating that the U.S. Attorney’s charging policy “had a discriminatory effect and that it was motivated by a discriminatory purpose.” United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456, 465, 116 S.Ct. 1480, 134 L.Ed.2d 687 (1996), quoting Wayte v. United States, 470 U.S. 598, 608, 105 S.Ct. 1524, 84 L.Ed.2d 547 (1985). The standard, as the Armstrong court observed, “is a demanding one.” Id. at 463, 116 S.Ct. 1480.
To obtain the discovery he sought here, Bass was required to produce “some evidence” in support of both elements of his selective prosecution defense. See United States v. Jones, 159 F.3d 969, 978 (6th Cir.1998). This standard is itself a “rigorous” one, see Armstrong, 517 U.S. at 468, 116 S.Ct. 1480, and in my judgment Bass failed to meet it.
Statistically, it is true that most of the capital-eligible prosecutions in the Eastern District of Michigan have been brought against African Americans, It is difficult for me to see how this datum constitutes even “some” evidence of discriminatory effect, however, given what I take to be the complete absence of any evidence that the U.S. Attorney’s Office failed to initiate capital-eligible prosecutions against individuals whose situations were similar to that of Mr. Bass but whose race was different. “To establish a discriminatory effect in a race case,” Armstrong confirms, “the claimant must show that similarly situated individuals of a different race were not prosecuted.” Id. at 465, 116 S.Ct. 1480. And to obtain discovery in this connection, there must be a “credible showing of different treatment of similarly situated persons.” Id. at 470,116 S.Ct. 1480.
Hunter v. Underwood, 471 U.S. 222, 105 S.Ct. 1916, 85 L.Ed.2d 222 (1985), which was distinguished in Armstrong and on which my colleagues on the panel rely heavily here, was a case in which the State of Georgia had adopted a constitutional *542provision disenfranchising persons convicted of crimes involving moral turpitude. There was direct evidence that the state’s purpose had been to deny the vote to blacks. See Hunter; 471 U.S. at 229-31, 105 S.Ct. 1916; Armstrong, 517 U.S. at 467, 116 S.Ct. 1480. The provision had a racially disparate impact in practice, disenfranchising blacks at least 1.7 times as often as whites — and in this context the Hunter court concluded that under the analysis of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., 429 U.S. 252, 97 S.Ct. 555, 50 L.Ed.2d 450 (1977), and Mt. Healthy City School Dist. Bd. of Educ. v. Doyle, 429 U.S. 274, 97 S.Ct. 568, 50 L.Ed.2d 471 (1977), there had been a denial of equal protection of the laws. Hunter, 471 U.S. at 233, 105 S.Ct. 1916.
The defendant in Armstrong argued that Hunter “cut against any absolute requirement that there be a showing of failure to prosecute similarly situated individuals.” Armstrong, 517 U.S. at 467, 116 S.Ct. 1480. The Armstrong court rejected this argument, noting that the persons adversely affected by Georgia’s constitutional provision were all “similarly situated;” the holding in Hunter was thus “consistent with ordinary equal protection principles, including the similarly situated requirement.” Id.
The reason that the members of the pool of people disenfranchised by the Georgia constitutional provision were “similarly situated,” I take it, was that all of them-— black and white — had been convicted of crimes of moral turpitude. In the case before us here, by contrast, there is simply no evidence of any white person being in a situation comparable to Bass’ and not being prosecuted.
More importantly, perhaps, there is no evidence here of a racially discriminatory motive corresponding to the improper motives of which there was direct evidence in both Hunter and Jones. The fact that top Justice Department officials have expressed concern over some of the national statistics does not, in my view, constitute “evidence” that capital-eligible charges were brought against Bass because of his race and not simply because there is probable cause to believe that he is responsible for a series of murders committed to protect his drug business.
In my view the district court’s decision to grant discovery was unwarranted as a matter of law, and the dismissal of the death penalty notice was thus an abuse of discretion. Insofar as the court holds otherwise, I respectfully dissent.