Court Opinion

ID: 9481441
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:19:00.727541+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:19.047408
License: Public Domain

ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I agree that the judgment of the District Court, dismissing this petition for habeas corpus, should be affirmed. My reasoning in reaching this result, however, differs somewhat from the Court’s, and I write separately to explain that difference.
To me, this case can be disposed of solely on the issue of prejudice, as that term is used in applying the Strickland test for ineffective assistance of counsel. I would assume for purposes of argument that counsel was guilty of ineffective assistance in failing to make a proper Swain argument at the time of Wright’s trial. I further assume that, had the argument been properly pressed, the one black juror who was the subject of a peremptory strike would have served on the jury. (A panel member of Korean descent was also struck, but the reason given was that the juror was unfamiliar with the English language, and this seems to me a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason.) There is absolutely no reason to suppose that a jury so constituted would have reached a different result in petitioner’s trial. Indeed, petitioner does not even make this argument.
Wright urges instead that the proper definition of prejudice for Strickland purposes in the present context should focus on whether he received a trial by a jury that was constitutionally chosen. It seems quite likely that he did not. Indeed, the Iowa Court of Appeals was itself of the view that there had been a systematic pattern of exclusion of black people from criminal juries in Black Hawk County, Iowa. This is the kind of prejudice that would, I think, have been entirely sufficient to produce a reversal on direct appeal if the record had been properly preserved. But it is not, it seems to me, the kind of prejudice that the Strickland Court had in mind. An injustice has been done here, all right, but the injustice is more to the black citizens of Black Hawk County as a group — unfairly preventing them from serving on juries— than it is to the petitioner himself. He has not shown that the individual jurors who tried him were not impartial, and, as already noted, he has not even begun to show that the presence of the black juror in question on the jury that tried him would have affected the outcome at all. It is in the sense of outcome, I submit, that the Strickland Court used the term “prejudice.” The focus is on the outcome of the individual trial. Is there a reasonable likelihood that it would have been different? Here, I am persuaded that there is no such likelihood, and I therefore agree that this judgment should be affirmed.