Court Opinion

ID: 9472639
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:06:10.475827+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:03.056481
License: Public Domain

TJOFLAT, Circuit Judge,
specially concurring:
I concur in the court’s judgment and in its opinion, except as to part II.A.l. in which it refuses to decide whether the relevant community for sixth amendment fair cross-section purposes consists of those qualified for jury service. I firmly believe that we must answer this question to decide this case and that the answer is in the affirmative.
The sixth amendment claim which appellants presented unsuccessfully to the district court and which appellants present to us now is that the system for choosing grand jury venire members in the Miami Division of the Southern District of Florida violated their right to a grand jury representing a fair cross section of the community, created by the sixth amendment and the Jury Selection and Service Act of 1968, 28 U.S.C. §§ 1861-69 (1982), because an insufficient number of Hispanics was chosen. Appellants contended that Hispanics constituted 24.2 to 26.6 percent of the population of Dade and Collier Counties eligible for jury service, because they met the qualifications set forth in the district court’s jury plan, but they comprised only 12.9 percent
*1479of the court’s qualified wheel.1 Appellants argued that such absolute disparity (11.3 to 13.7 percent), see infra note 6, established prima facie their sixth amendment claim. They relied on the testimony of Dr. John B. McConahay for these figures. Ante at 1471-1472.
Dr. McConahay’s testimony established only one of these figures, however, the percentage of Hispanics in the court’s qualified wheel. His testimony attempted to show the percentage of Hispanics among those in Dade and Collier Counties eligible for jury service, but the district court found it was not probative of that percentage. The court did so because the sources Dr. McConahay had used to determine that percentage were highly unreliable. Moreover, the court could not infer that Hispanics occupied approximately the same portion of the eligible community as they did of the population as a whole, because a disproportionate number of Hispanics were likely to be ineligible for jury service, due to age, lack of citizenship, and lack of sufficient English language skills.2 Ante at 1472-1473. As the majority properly concludes, the evidence Dr. McConahay presented “did not permit the calculation of the number of eligible Latins” in the Miami Division community. Ante at 1474.3 Thus, appellants having failed to establish a fig*1480ure essential to their claim, the district court had no alternative but to reject it.
Appellants now present an alternative argument. They were not required to show a disparity between the percentage of Hispanics in the court’s qualified wheel and the percentage of Hispanics in the eligible population; instead, it was enough that they showed a disparity between the percentage of Hispanics on the qualified wheel and the percentage of Hispanics in the entire community, eligible and ineligible as well. The fact that more Hispanics than non-Hispanics lacked the requisite juror qualifications thus becomes irrelevant.
I submit that appellants’ alternative argument has no merit. “The ‘truly representative cross-section’ requirement encompasses only individuals qualified to serve as jurors.” United States v. Gordon-Nikkar, 518 F.2d 972, 976 (5th Cir.1975). See also United States ex rel. Barksdale v. Blackburn, 639 F.2d 1115 (5th Cir.) (en banc), cert. denied, 454 U.S. 1056, 102 S.Ct. 603, 70 L.Ed.2d 593 (1981); United States v. Brummitt, 665 F.2d 521 (5th Cir.1981), cert. denied, 456 U.S. 977, 102 S.Ct. 2244, 72 L.Ed.2d 852 (1982). “[I]t has never been thought that federal juries must be drawn from a cross-section of the total population without the imposition of any qualifications.” United States v. McVean, 436 F.2d 1120, 1122 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 404 U.S. 822, 92 S.Ct. 45, 30 L.Ed.2d 50 (1971). In fact, the Jury Selection and Service Act of 1968, 28 U.S.C. § 1861 (1982), states that it is “the policy of the United States that all citizens shall have the opportunity to be considered for service on grand and petit juries in the district courts ... and shall have an obligation to serve as jurors when summoned for that purpose.” (Emphasis added.) Implicit in this policy statement is the notion that noncitizens shall not have that opportunity.
I find no Supreme Court case containing language implying that a defendant is entitled to a grand jury that reflects a cross section of the entire community. Indeed, the recognition of such a right would pose insuperable problems. Eligibility requirements for those who actually sit on the grand jury are clearly constitutional. See Perkins v. Smith, 370 F.Supp. 134 (D.Md.1974) (three judge court), aff'd, 426 U.S. 913, 96 S.Ct. 2616, 49 L.Ed.2d 368 (1976) (rule declaring aliens ineligible to serve on jury upheld). Therefore, if criminal suspects were entitled to grand juries reflecting the entire community, the qualified *1481jury list would need to be weighted to reflect the community. If only one or two people from a given group were eligible to serve, they might be required to sit on every jury. The weighting would have to be changed frequently to reflect accurately the population. Moreover, the weighting itself would be subject to attack as diluting the rights of grand jury venire members to serve.4 In summary, I submit that prior case law holds and sound policy counsels that the sixth amendment cross-section requirement refers only to eligible jurors. The district court, then, in assuming that the sixth amendment requires proportional representation of eligible jurors, applied the correct legal standard.
The majority, citing Castaneda v. Partida, 430 U.S. 482, 494, 97 S.Ct. 1272, 1280, 51 L.Ed.2d 498 (1977), rejects appellants’ sixth amendment claim because appellants failed to show that Hispanics had been underrepresented on Miami Division grand juries “ ‘over a significant period of time.”’5 Ante at 1473. (Emphasis added.) Castaneda requires no such showing; accordingly, the majority should have proceeded to decide the issue placed squarely before us — whether the sixth amendment required appellants to show that the percentage of Hispanics in the district court’s qualified wheel was significantly lower than the percentage of Hispanics in the Miami Division community eligible for jury service.
Castaneda v. Partida was a fourteenth amendment equal protection case; as such, it is inapposite here. Partida, convicted in Texas state court for burglary at night, with intent to rape, claimed in a motion for new trial that the Hildago County grand jury that indicted him had been selected in an invidiously discriminatory manner. At a hearing on his motion, Partida established that the jury commissioners, in summoning the prospective grand jurors from which his grand jury was subsequently qualified and empaneled, purposefully selected few Mexiean-Americans because of their ethnic origin. Partida' established this fact through some telling circumstantial evidence. First, the jury commissioner selection system lent itself to the sort of abuse claimed. The system operated on purely subjective judgments of the commissioners in a community with a substantial history of discrimination against Mexican-Americans. Second, over the previous ten-year period the system had produced an absolute disparity6 of forty percent between the portion of Mexiean-Americans, both eligible and ineligible, summoned by the commissioners, and the portion of MexieanAmericans in the total community. Had the system been unbiased, the percentage of Mexiean-Americans summoned should have approximated the percentage of Mexican-Americans in the general community.
The State offered no evidence in rebuttal, and the trial judge rejected Partida’s claim. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed, Partida v. State, 506 S.W.2d 209 (Tex.Crim.App.1974), holding, inter alia, that Partida had failed to make out a prima facie case of invidious, ethnic-based discrimination. Partida then petitioned a federal district court for habeas corpus relief. *1482Following an evidentiary hearing, the district court concluded that Partida’s evidence of purposeful discrimination had established a prima facie equal protection case, but that that case had been rebutted by the State’s showing that Partida’s statistical evidence was unreliable. Moreover, the court doubted that the commissioners had actually intended to discriminate against Mexican-Americans in a county in which Mexican-Americans were the “governing majority.” The district court therefore rejected Partida’s claim. Partida appealed, and the Fifth Circuit reversed. Partida v. Castaneda, 524 F.2d 481 (5th Cir.1975), aff’d, 430 U.S. 482, 97 S.Ct. 1272, 51 L.Ed.2d 498 (1977). It agreed with the district court that Partida had made out a prima facie case, but disagreed with its conclusion that the State had adequately rebutted it. The Supreme Court granted certiorari.
The Court held that Partida had clearly established, through circumstantial evidence, that the jury commissioners had purposefully discriminated against Mexican-Americans when choosing those from Hidalgo County’s general population who would be tendered to the court for qualification as putative grand jurors. The Court considered the commissioners’ eleven-year history of summoning a disproportionately low percentage of Mexican-Americans to jury service highly indicative of the sort of invidious discrimination condemned by the fourteenth amendment’s equal protection clause. It was in this context that the Court used the language, “over a significant period of time,” Castaneda v. Parti-da, 430 U.S. 482, 494, 97 S.Ct. 1272, 1280 (1977), the majority seizes upon to explain why appellants, here, failed to prove a sixth amendment violation. The Court unambiguously said that:
in order to show that an equal protection violation has occurred in the context of grand jury selection, the defendant must show that the procedure employed resulted in substantial underrepresentation of ... the identifiable group to which he belongs____ [T]he degree of underrepresentation must be proved, by comparing the proportion of the group in the total population to the proportion called to serve as grand jurors, over a significant period of time.7
Id. at 1280 (emphasis added). Partida had done just that. He had shown that the jury commissioners, in summoning prospective jurors, both eligible and ineligible, from the general population, had substantially underrepresented Mexican-Americans for a significant period of time. This permitted the necessary inference that the commissioners’ conduct in summoning veniremen from which his grand jury was drawn was not accidental, but deliberate. Partida’s grand jury, having been chosen from a venire so tainted, was itself tainted, in violation of the equal protection clause.
The appellants, in the district court, did not present an equal protection claim like Partida’s, and their proof did not disclose one. To replicate Partida’s claim of purposeful ethnic discrimination appellants would have had to show the following: first, that the percentage of Hispanics in the court’s master wheel, which contained both eligible and ineligible, from which their grand jury was derived was substantially lower than the percentage of Hispanics in the Miami Division’s general population; second, that such underrepresentation had occurred over a significant period of time, so that one could infer that those charged with operating the system, the judges of the Southern District of Florida, had notice of it; and, third, that the evidence considered as a whole permitted the *1483inference that the judges intended to preclude Hispanics from actually serving on grand juries.
Appellants did not present such a claim because they could not have proved it. In contrast to the highly subjective jury summoning system in Partida’s case, the system here was entirely neutral. There is not one whit of a suggestion that anyone associated with the design or operation of the district court’s jury plan intended to discriminate against anyone. Thus, appellants lacked the atmosphere for the sort of purposeful discrimination present in Parti-da’s ease. More significantly, however, they lacked the evidence to prove what Partida established, see supra note 2, that in the general population Hispanics were just as likely to be qualified for jury service as non-Hispanics. In fact, the contrary was true; substantial numbers of Hispanics in South Florida were not citizens or otherwise qualified for federal jury service.
In summary, I would hold straightforwardly that appellants failed to make out their sixth amendment fair cross-section claim because they failed to prove an essential element of that claim, the percentage of Hispanics eligible for jury service in the general population of the Miami Division.

. The Southern District of Florida made up that qualified jury wheel in conformance with the scheme prescribed by the Jury Selection and Service Act of 1968, 28 U.S.C. §§ 1861-69 (1982). Ante at 1470 n. 3.

. The district court took judicial notice that many Hispanics in Dade and Collier Counties would be ineligible for jury service for many reasons, including lack of citizenship and inability to speak adequate English. Ante at 1473. This was not true to the same extent as to other "distinctive” groups in the community. Thus, the court could not infer that the percentage of Hispanics in the eligible population and the entire population (both eligible and ineligible) was essentially the same. Absent this inference, appellants had no figure to compare with the 12.9 percent Hispanic figure gleaned from the qualified wheel for disparity analysis, and their claim had to fail.
The defendant encountered the same problem in Castaneda v. Partida, 430 U.S. 482, 97 S.Ct. 1272, 51 L.Ed.2d 498 (1977), although in a fourteenth amendment equal protection context. Partida, as appellants did here, introduced (Hi-dalgo County) census figures, including the percentage of the population presumably Mexican-American. The question then arose whether the court could infer that the Mexican-American percentage of the eligible population was approximately the same. The State argued that the inference could not be drawn. The Texas Criminal Court of Appeals agreed, observing:
How many of those listed in the census figures with Mexican-American names were not citizens of the state, but were so-called "wetbacks” from the south side of the Rio Grande; how many were migrant workers and not residents of Hidalgo County; how many were illiterate and could not read and write; how many were not of sound mind and good moral character; how many had been convicted of a felony or were under indictment or legal accusation for theft or a felony; none of these facts appear in the record.
Partida v. State, 506 S.W.2d 209, 211 (Tex.Crim.App.1974).
Later, on certiorari, the U.S. Supreme Court, carefully parsing the circumstantial evidence in the record, concluded that, even though these questions had gone unanswered, Partida’s proof permitted the inference, for prima facie case purposes, that the Mexican-American percentage of the eligible population approximated the Mexican-American percentage of the total population. The Court went on to hold that the State had the burden, in rebuttal, of answering the questions the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals had raised and that it had failed to do so. 430 U.S. at 498-99, 97 S.Ct. at 1282.
In the case at hand, the facts the district court judicially noticed concerning the citizenship, etc. of South Florida Hispanics operated to rebut any inference appellants sought to have drawn from the preliminary 1980 census data and the Dade Latin Market Survey as to the Hispanic percentage of the eligible population in Dade and Collier Counties.

. It cannot be gainsaid that the best way to establish a sixth amendment fair cross-section claim in a federal district court criminal prosecution is to establish two figures: the percentage of the "distinctive” group in the qualified wheel (i.e., eligible to serve) and the percentage of that group in the entire community population (i.e., in the division or district from which the prospective jurors are drawn) who are eligible to serve. A showing of substantial disproportion between these two figures will make out a prima facie case of no fair cross section. Two other figures are often cited in support of an underrepresentation claim; these are the percentage of the “distinctive” group in the entire community population and the percentage of that group in the master wheel (i.e., those who have had juror qualification forms mailed to them). Three proportions can be made from these four figures, in addition to the proportion *1480I describe above as that best establishing a no fair cross-section claim. One of these three has some probative value in assessing such a claim; the other two have minimal, if any, probative value.
The first of these proportions is the percentage of the "distinctive” group in the master wheel over the percentage of that group in the total population. That proportion may be highly probative of intentional discrimination in choosing the people on the master wheel, as was the case in Castaneda v. Partida. See supra note 2. In random selection systems, such as the ones used in federal district courts, that proportion may also yield some inference that sixth amendment underrepresentation has occurred because it may be that the proportion of the percentage of the group on the qualified wheel over the percentage of the group in the eligible population (the proportion the proponent of the sixth amendment claim seeks) will not differ greatly. (In the case before us, the proportions differed significantly because substantial numbers of Hispanics, compared with other groups, were probably ineligible for jury service. See supra note 2.)
The two remaining proportions, comparing the percentage of the group on the qualified wheel to the percentage in the total community and comparing the percentage of the group in the master wheel to the percentage in the eligible community, are both of extremely low probative value. The first of these overstates the problem; it compares an eligible group with the eligible and ineligible in the total population. The greater the number of ineligibles in the total population (as in the case here), the more the distortion of the proportion occurs. The second of these two proportions understates the problem because it compares a group of eligi-bles and ineligibles to only the eligible population. Without some figures or explanations indicating that the ineligibles in each of these two proportions are likely to be an extremely small group, or without an extremely large disparity, see Foster v. Sparks, 506 F.2d 805, 833 (5th Cir.1975), these two proportions can be disregarded as not accurately reflecting the actual cross-section proportion.

. In the weighting process, by definition some qualified grand jury venire persons would be called less frequently than they would be called absent the weighting process. They might well have a claim that their right to serve on the grand jury was being diluted by the weighting process.

. Assuming arguendo that the sixth amendment required appellants to demonstrate that Hispanic underrepresentation occurred “over a significant period of time,” I submit that Dr. McCona-hay’s study was sufficient. It covered the composition of the Miami Division master and qualified wheels between January 1978 and March 1981, rather than the mere one year the majority cites. Ante at 1473.

. In deciding a sixth amendment no fair cross-section claim, a claim not explicitly presented in Castaneda, we consider the deviation from proportional representation in absolute rather than relative terms. For example, if Hispanics constitute 30 percent of the community but only 15 percent of the qualified jury wheel, the absolute disparity is 15 percent whereas the relative disparity is 50 percent. The relative measure may distort the significance of a deviation. See Foster v. Sparks, 506 F.2d 805, 834-35 (5th Cir.1975).

. I suggest that "called to serve as grand jurors" must be construed in the light of the factual context before the Court in Castaneda. The jury commissioners were compiling what in the federal district courts would be called a "master wheel,” containing persons both eligible and ineligible to serve as jurors, ante at 1470 n. 3, and they were apparently doing so without attempting to winnow out those who might not be qualified. Castaneda, 430 U.S. at 488-89 n. 8, 97 S.Ct. at 1276-77 n. 8. Thus, to do their job in a nondiscriminatory manner the commissioners should have summoned an unqualified grand jury venire consisting of substantially equal representation of the "distinctive” groups, like Mexican-Americans, in the community.