Court Opinion

ID: 9461020
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:04:04.24967+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:51.484186
License: Public Domain

ROSS, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I dissent. In Aldridge v. United States, 283 U.S. 308, 51 S.Ct. 470, 75 L.Ed. 1054 (1931), a judgment of conviction was reversed because the “court failed to ask any question [on voir dire] which could be deemed to cover the subject” of racial prejudice. Id. at 311, 51 S.Ct. at 472 (emphasis added). In Ham v. South Carolina, 409 U.S. 524, 93 S.Ct. 848, 35 L.Ed.2d 46 (1973), the Supreme Court held that nothing requires the trial court “to put the question in any particular form, or to ask any particular number of questions on the subject, simply because requested to do so by petitioner.” Id. at 527, 93 S.Ct. at 850. Indeed, the Supreme Court indicated that either of the general questions propounded by the petitioner in Ham, see p. 912, supra, would have been “sufficient to focus the attention of prospective jurors on any racial prejudice they might entertain.” Id.
Here the trial court made general inquiries, see p. 910, supra, into the area of possible Indian prejudice. This Circuit has specifically approved the use of such general questions in a probe for bias, see United States v. Thompson, 490 F.2d 1218 (8th Cir. 1974) and United States v. Powers, 482 F.2d 941, 944 (8th Cir. 1973), cert. denied, 415 U.S. 923, 94 S.Ct. 1426, 39 L.Ed.2d 479 (1974), and expressly recognized that the scope of inquiry into an area of possible bias is a matter committed to the sound discretion of the trial judge, see United States v. Delay, 500 F.2d 1360 (8th Cir. 1974) and Pope v. United States, 372 F.2d 710, 727 (8th Cir. 1967), vacated on other grounds, 392 U.S. 651, 88 S.Ct. 2145, 20 L.Ed.2d 1317 (1968). Here the majority reasons that the facts in this case warrant deviation from the rules of the Supreme Court and our own Circuit in this respect. Yet the only “facts” advanced in support thereof are that the defendant is a member of a minority race which was involved in a widely-publicized incident in the same district in which the instant crime was committed and that a change of venue in another case was granted for charges arising out of the publicized event. I agree that it would have been preferable to ask individual jurors probing questions to determine possible bias. But under the rule announced in Ham v. South Carolina, supra, 409 U.S. at 527, 93 S.Ct. 848, 35 L.Ed.2d 46, and under the decisions of this Court heretofore cited, the failure to do so was not reversible error.