Court Opinion

ID: 9732498
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 16:23:26.030663+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:28.532478
License: Public Domain

CHIEF JUSTICE HARRISON, dissenting: Robin Praser is a black woman. Defendant originally charged that the State had excluded her from the jury because she is black, an action which would violate Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 90 L. Ed. 2d 69, 106 S. Ct. 1712 (1986). In response to that charge, the State assorted that the color of Praser’s skin had nothing to do with its decision. According to the State, the real reason it struck her from the jury pool was because, among other things, it wanted “more men to balance out the jury.” People v. Hudson, 157 Ill. 2d 401, 432 (1993). Although gender can be used as a pretext for racial discrimination (J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B., 511 U.S. 127, 145, 128 L. Ed. 2d 89, 107, 114 S. Ct. 1419, 1430 (1994)), our court has held that it was not pretextual in this case. Hudson, 157 Ill. 2d at 432. For the purposes of this discussion, I am therefore willing to accept the State’s explanation. Praser was not sent home because she was African American. She was sent home because, inter alia, the State wanted more men and she was not a man. Excluding a woman from the jury in order to obtain more men is directly analogous to excluding African Americans in order to obtain more whites. Favoring whites over African Americans is plainly prohibited. Favoring men over women is equally unlawful. Just as the jury selection process must be race neutral, it must be blind to gender. Under the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment (U.S. Const., amend. XIV), the government may not exclude a person from jury service based on whether the person is a man or a woman. J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B., 511 U.S. 127, 128 L. Ed. 2d 89, 114 S. Ct. 1419 (1994). Exclusion of even one potential juror on the basis of gender requires reversal. People v. Blackwell, 171 Ill. 2d 338, 349 (1996). There is no need to conduct another evidentiary hearing on the State’s motives for excluding Praser in this case. The State was quite clear about why it did what it did. As previously indicated, Praser was denied a seat on the jury because she was not a man. To be sure, other reasons were also given for why Praser was sent home, specifically, her unemployment, inappropriate demeanor, and lack of attention to detail and instructions. Nevertheless, the existence of valid, nondiscriminatory explanations cannot counteract an overtly stated and blatantly unlawful motive. As legitimate as the other reasons given by the State may have been, it is clear that the State would not have acted as it did had it not been for the additional fact of Praser’s gender. The majority would surely have bristled had the State contended that Praser was excused because she was an unemployed, inattentive black person who acted inappropriately. I cannot imagine why the majority thinks it any better for the State to have excluded her on the grounds that she was an unemployed, inattentive woman who acted inappropriately. Under the law, Praser’s sex simply should not have entered into the State’s determination. No matter how many other women were already on the jury, the State had no right to take Praser’s gender into account when it considered her. Achieving gender “balance” is not a legally defensible objective. Rather, it is an example of precisely the sort of gender stereotyping condemned by the United States Supreme Court in J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B., 511 U.S. 127, 128 L. Ed. 2d 89, 114 S. Ct. 1419 (1994). It cannot be tolerated. As the Court wrote in that case: “All persons, when granted the opportunity to serve on a jury, have the right not to be excluded summarily because of discriminatory and stereotypical presumptions that reflect and reinforce patterns of historical discrimination. Striking individual jurors on the assumption that they hold particular views simply because of their gender is ‘practically a brand upon them, affixed by the law, an assertion of their inferiority.’ [Citation.] It denigrates the dignity of the excluded juror, and, for a woman, reinvokes a history of exclusion from political participation. The message it sends to all those in the courtroom, and all those who may later learn of the discriminatory act, is that certain individuals, for no reason other than gender, are presumed unqualified by state actors to decide important questions upon which reasonable persons could disagree.” J.E.B., 511 U.S. at 141-42, 128 L. Ed. 2d at 105, 114 S. Ct. at 1428. The State should not be allowed to escape the proscriptions of J.E.B. by being given the opportunity to show that it would have excluded Praser even if she had not been a woman. The State has already been given the opportunity to explain its decision to exclude Praser, and it admitted taking gender into account. Nearly a decade has passed since then. At this point, it is difficult to see how the State could credibly establish that gender did not matter after all. Even absent the lapse of time, problems of proving an alternative and independent motivation would be substantial. Ultimately, the issue will turn on the representations of the individual prosecutors. While there may be some external corroboration for why they excluded persons of one sex, that is not enough. Prosecutors must also explain why they failed to strike persons of the opposite sex. For that there will be no record. Prosecutors do not memorialize why they have accepted a juror. As a result, the prosecutor’s post hoc explanations will be virtually unchallengeable. As long as the court finds the prosecutor credible, the prosecutor’s justifications will be controlling. The consequences of such a system are easy to foresee. If there is no meaningful review of a prosecutor’s claim that he would have excluded a woman anyway, even if she had not been female, hearings regarding the prosecutor’s motives will be reduced to an exercise in creative after-the-fact rationalization. Prosecutors will almost always be able to generate an alternative, non-gender-based explanation for their actions, and courts will have little choice but to accept their explanations at face value. The result is that J.E.B. will be rendered a nullity. Justice Thurgood Marshall addressed the same problem in criticizing application of the “dual motivation” test to cases involving Batson and racial discrimination in jury selection. He wrote: “To excuse *** prejudice when it does surface, on the ground that a prosecutor can also articulate nonracial factors for his challenges, would be absurd. Batson would ' thereby become irrelevant, and racial discrimination in jury selection, perhaps the greatest embarrassment in the administration of our criminal justice system, would go undeterred. If such ‘smoking guns’ are ignored, we have little hope of combating the more subtle forms of racial discrimination.” Wilkerson v. Texas, 493 U.S. 924, 928, 107 L. Ed. 2d 272, 275, 110 S. Ct. 292, 295 (1989) (Marshall, J., dissenting on denial of cert., joined by Brennan, J.). I agree with Justice Marshall, not with the lower court decisions cited by the majority in this case. The “dual motivation” test cannot be squared with the principles underlying Batson and J.E.B. If prosecutors must provide a race- and gender-neutral basis for a peremptory challenge, and the law says they must, their explanation must be free from any taint of racial or gender bias. The explanation proffered by the prosecution in this case does not meet that test. Defendant should therefore be granted a new trial.