Court Opinion

ID: 9794183
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 03:00:53.70953+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:12:42.030118
License: Public Domain

BROUSSARD, J.
I dissent. The two decisions filed today—Williams v. Superior Court, post, page 736 [263 Cal.Rptr. 503, 781 P.2d 537] (hereafter cited as Williams) and the present decision—together threaten to undermine both the defendant’s right to a representative jury and his right to a jury of the vicinage. After today, those fundamental constitutional rights will mean no more than a right to be tried before a jury representative of someplace or other—the place to be chosen by the state. Thus defendant’s rights are reduced to a mere formality, a facade without substance, a “hollow form of words.” (People v. Wheeler (1978) 22 Cal.3d 258, 272 [148 Cal.Rptr. 890, 583 P.2d 748].)
I.
Williams concerned the defendant’s right to a jury representative of “the community.” It is intended to decide (at least for cases tried in the Los Angeles County Superior Court) that the community is the judicial district, and goes on to declare that the relevant judicial district is the one where defendant is tried. (Williams, supra,post, at pp. 744-745; see dis. opn. at p. 748.) Thus, if defendant is tried in any of the 11 superior court judicial districts in Los Angeles County, his constitutional right is to a jury representative of that district, even if the district in question has no relationship to the charged crime. He has no right to a jury representative of the district where the crime was committed, unless that is also the place of trial; he has no right to a jury representative of the county as a whole.
The present case concerns the defendant’s right to a jury selected from “the vicinage” of the crime. If we were to hold that “vicinage” means the same thing as “community,” the vicinage right would guarantee defendant a trial in the district where the crime was committed. Such a holding would dispel the dangers created by the Williams decision. The majority, however, hold that the vicinage is not the community but the county, and that defendant’s right to be tried in the vicinage is satisfied if the jury is selected from any portion of the county, no matter how remote from the place of the crime.
When we put the two decisions together, we can see clearly how they will affect the racial composition of the jury. The 11 superior court districts in *731Los Angeles County have markedly different racial mixes. Juries from the South Central District will be about 25 percent Black. The Central District also has large proportions of Blacks and Hispanics. The Western District, by contrast, is 90 percent White, and the North Valley District has even less minority representation. Under the majority decision, when a court decides where a case is to be tried, and which community the jury must represent, it is also deciding whether the defendant is likely to be tried by a racially mixed jury or a predominately White jury.
Even though a crime is committed in the South Central District, the present decision would permit the prosecutor to file charges in any of the 11 districts he prefers.1 Once charges are filed, the court can transfer the case to any district it chooses.2 Thus the case in question may end up being tried in the North Valley District, before a jury representative of that district. If that happens, it is irrelevant, according to the majority, that (a) the North Valley District is not the community where the crime was committed, (b) that residents of the community where the crime was committed are systematically excluded from the North Valley District venire, (c) that the North Valley District was selected by the state, for reasons of its own convenience and preference, over the objection of the defendant, and (d) that by selecting the North Valley District, the state has substantially reduced or eliminated minority representation on the jury.
II.
The majority opinion reaches its conclusion without considering the interests, community and individual, protected by the rights to a representative jury and a jury of the vicinage. In People v. Guzman (1988) 45 Cal.3d 915 [248 Cal.Rptr. 467, 755 P.2d 917], we explained that the vicinage right “vindicates the community’s right to sit in judgment on crimes committed within its territory. . . . ‘As a result, where jurors act [ ] as the conscience of the community, they would be reflecting the conscience of their own community, however large, rather than the conscience of a community *732unaffected by the crime.’. . . Trials in the community of local criminal matters, particularly shocking crimes, provide a substitute for the natural human reactions of outrage, protest and some form of vengeful self-help. . . . Absent a showing that there is a reasonable likelihood of an unfair trial, a community retains the right to try its own crimes.” (P. 937, citations and fns. omitted.) Taylor v. Louisiana (1975) 419 U.S. 522, 530 [42 L.Ed.2d 690, 698, 95 S.Ct. 692], spoke in similar terms of the right to a representative jury: “Community participation in the administration of the criminal law ... is not only consistent with our democratic heritage but is also critical to public confidence in the fairness of the criminal justice system.”
But the value of community participation is diminished if the community where the case is tried, from which the jury is selected, and which the jury represents, is “ ‘a community unaffected by the crime.’ ” (People v. Guzman, supra, 45 Cal.3d 915, 937.) When a crime committed in the South Central District is tried in the North Valley District—or vice versa—the community most affected by the crime is excluded from any participation in the verdict.
The right to a jury of the vicinage serves also to protect the defendant. The vicinage right rests on the perception that persons from the community where the crime was committed would be familiar with the conditions, practices, and mores of the community, that they were the defendant’s true “peers” who alone could give him a fair trial. (See Kershen, Vicinage (1976) 29 Okla.L.Rev. 801, 834.) “Supporters of a jury of the vicinage clearly saw that because a jury would exercise its function as the conscience of the community to reflect the attitudes, sympathies, and values of the community from which the jury was drawn, a jury of the vicinage would be different from a jury anywhere else.” (Id. at p. 842.) The right to a representative jury addresses the same concerns, guaranteeing that the attitudes, sympathies and values of cognizable community groups are not excluded in the process of selecting the jury. (See People v. Wheeler (1978) 22 Cal.3d 258, 266-267 [148 Cal.Rptr. 890, 583 P.2d 748].)
But the protective interaction of the right to a representative jury and the right to a jury of the vicinage fails if “community” means one thing for jury representation and something quite different for vicinage. The majority here permit a case to be tried by a jury selected entirely from a judicial district which may have no more connection to the case than its possession of the next open courtroom. The jurors of that community may have no understanding of the local conditions which gave rise to, and may mitigate, the crime. Their attitudes, sympathies, and values are not those of the residents of the district where the crime was committed. At the same time, attitudes *733and values characteristic of the place of the crime may find no voice, because the cognizable groups who hold those attitudes are unrepresented in the district of trial.
We need a consistent definition of “community” to protect the values underlying the constitutional right to representative jury and to a jury of the vicinage. If we take as given Williams’s holding that for purposes of representation the community is the judicial district, then I submit we should hold that for the purpose of vicinage the community is also the judicial district.
III.
The majority do not tell us why they select the county instead of the judicial district as the vicinage. Most of their opinion reviews the federal decisions on vicinage, most of which hold that under the Sixth Amendment vicinage means the federal judicial district. That holding, however, turns out to be of little use in our present task, that of defining “a state criminal defendant’s vicinage right.” (Ante, p. 728.) As the majority point out, a definition in terms of federal districts “has little meaning in our system, where the Legislature has created jurisdictional boundaries that bear no relationship to the federal judicial districts [in the state].” (Ibid.) The majority then criticize, and ultimately overrule, People v. Jones (1973) 9 Cal.3d 546 [108 Cal.Rptr. 345, 510 P.2d 705], on the ground that it is inconsistent with the definition of vicinage in the federal cases, a definition they have previously acknowledged has little meaning in our system. Finally, the majority “hold that in California the boundaries of the vicinage are coterminous with the boundaries of the county.” (Ante, p. 729.)3
This decision—the crucial decision of the case—is unsupported by the history, cases, or commentators cited by the majority. No reasons of law or policy are advanced in its support. The majority simply assert that the county, not the state judicial district, is the vicinage, and view that assertion as deciding the matter.
If, however, we followed the majority’s reasoning in Williams, we would have to conclude that the judicial district, not the county, defines the vici*734nage. Williams reviewed legislation establishing the superior court districts of Los Angeles County. (See Williams, supra, post, at pp. 744-745.) That legislation does not expressly, or even by implication, designate the judicial district as the “community” which the jury can represent. It does, however, arguably establish the district as the basic unit of the superior court system in Los Angeles County. In the majority’s words, “the considerations that prompted creation of the districts in the first place—the practical realities of the county’s unique demographics, its geographical expanse, and the need for judicial efficiency—convince us that the Legislature intended that the districts serve as the community .... In a sense, the districts were to be microcosms of an entity—the Los Angeles Superior Court—that had become unmanageable and inefficient as a single unit.” (Williams, supra, post, at p. 745.) From that fact the majority conclude that the Legislature intended the districts serve as the community represented by the jurors.
Identical reasoning should lead to the conclusion that the Legislature intended the districts to serve as the vicinage from which jurors are selected. The power of the Legislature to define the vicinage (see O’Hare v. Superior Court (1987) 43 Cal.3d 86, 94-95 [233 Cal.Rptr. 332, 729 P.2d 766]) is even better established than its power to define the community to be represented by the jurors. The statutes themselves use neither “vicinage” nor “community,” but speak of juries selected from and representing “the area served by the court.” (See, e.g., Code Civ. Proc., §§ 194, subd. (p), and 197, subd. (a).) If the “area served by the court” of each judicial district is limited to that district, which functions as the fundamental entity for trial of crimes in Los Angeles County, I see no reason why it should not also define the vicinage of crimes committed in that county.
IV.
A conclusion that the judicial district is the vicinage would conform to California precedent. People v. Jones, supra, 9 Cal. 3d 546, for 16 years the controlling California case, held expressly that “a jury drawn from only a portion of a county, exclusive of the place of the commission of the crime, will not satisfy the [constitutional] requirement.” (P. 553.) Jones concluded that the Constitution guarantees a criminal defendant “the right to be tried by an impartial jury comprising a representative cross-section of, and selected from residents of, the judicial district where the crime was committed.” (P. 556.) O’Hare v. Superior Court, supra, 43 Cal.3d 86, 101, spoke of the constitutional guaranty “that jurors be selected from an area which includes the scene of the crime.” People v. Guzman, supra, 43 Cal.3d 915, cited Jones with approval (p. 936) and, as I noted earlier, stressed the right of the community to participate in the trial of crimes committed in that communi*735ty. Only a jury selected from the community where the crime was committed will comply with the principles laid down in these decisions.
The majority, however, reject California precedent. They overrule Jones (the majority opinion does not mention O’Hare or Guzman), which will come as a shock to the litigants, all of whom recognized Jones as controlling and argued only its application in the factual setting of the present case. Yet the majority’s only reason for overruling Jones is that it was inconsistent with the majority of decisions in the lower federal courts. But the majority’s own decision conforms no better to federal precedent (which would require us to use the federal district, not the county, as the vicinage). If we are going to fashion a California rule which differs from the federal right to a jury selected from the federal district where the crime was committed, we should not start by abandoning California precedent.
The California decisions rejected today were crafted in light of the practical exigencies of jury selection in this state. Los Angeles County, the subject of this case, is unique in its population, diversity, and transportation problems. Its various regions are racially disparate, with some judicial districts made up largely of one minority group, while in others that group will be sparsely represented. Its courts cannot be efficiently managed as a single unit. (Williams, supra, post, at p. 745.) The majority rely on these realities in Williams to hold that juries should represent the judicial district instead of the county. Given this holding, defining vicinage as the judicial district is essential to protect the right of the defendant to a representative jury, and to protect the right of each community within this county to participate in the trial of crimes committed in that community.
Petitioner’s application for a rehearing was denied January 18, 1990. Mosk, J., and Broussard, J., were of the opinion that the petition should be granted.

Los Angeles Superior Court rule 300, section 3, requires the prosecutor to file either in the district where the crime was committed, the district where the preliminary hearing was held, or the Central District. Thus the prosecutor’s choices, while somewhat limited, will rarely be confined to the district of the crime. Moreover, rule 300 is simply a local rule of court. Under the majority decision, the superior court could constitutionally change that rule to permit the prosecutor to file in any district he chose.
Under rule 300, section 5, when calendars become congested the presiding judge can order cases which ordinarily could be filed in one district to be filed in another district. The rule imposes no restriction on the judge’s choice of the district where the cases must be filed.

Los Angeles Superior Court rule 300, sections 5 and 6, permit the transfer of cases to relieve court congestion, for the convenience of witnesses, or “to promote the ends of justice.” It imposes no limitation on the place to which the case is transferred.

The majority state that “[o]ur decision concerns only the parameters of the constitutional right of a criminal defendant to a jury of the vicinage as guaranteed by the federal Constitution. That is defendant’s sole challenge on this appeal.” (Ante, p. 729, fn. 9.) In my opinion, while the federal Constitution could support a holding that the vicinage in every state is defined by the federal judicial district, it offers no support for the majority’s holding “that in California the boundaries of the vicinage are coterminous with the boundaries of the county” (ante, p. 729). It appears, however, that the majority do not decide the question of vicinage under the California Constitution or statutes.