Court Opinion

ID: 9789181
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 01:29:58.381562+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:37:20.364181
License: Public Domain

Justice COATS,
concurring in the judgment only.
While I agree that the jury selection process in these cases did not violate the Sixth Amendment's fair cross-section requirement, I consider the majority's lengthy disquisition on techniques for describing disparity neither necessary nor helpful. In light of the majority's decision not to address the question of a statutory violation and its conclusion that this selection process did not produce any unconstitutional underrepresentation, I am also at a loss to understand its justification for disapproving the practice for future cases. Of perhaps greatest significance, however, I consider the majority's treatment of the concept of statistical significance, in particular, not only unhelpful but in fact quite problematic. Because I believe it is clear enough by inspection that the jury selection process used in these cases did not result in unfair or unreasonable underrepresentation of any distinctive group, I consider the bulk of the majority opinion little more than dicta.
Apart from questions about methodology and reliability,1 the defendant's data suggest *607underrepresentation of African-Americans and Hispanics, at best, by fewer than one in every three hundred prospective jurors. By contrast, the only findings of a Sixth Amendment fair cross-section violation with any precedential value for this court have involved selection processes that either excluded an entire distinctive group, comprising more than half of the general adult population, see Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 525-26, 95 S.Ct. 692, 42 L.Ed.2d 690 (1975), or resulted in a reduction in representation from one of every two, to one of every six, prospective women jurors-an underrepre-sentation of more than 100 women in every group of 300 prospective jurors, see Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357, 366, 99 S.Ct. 664, 58 L.Ed.2d 579 (1979). While the majority approves only certain techniques for describing or comparing data (as distinguished from actually inferring properties of general populations from particular samples), the Supreme Court has clearly shied away from even this degree of technicality, instead finding underrepresentation to be unreasonable only in cases of complete exclusion of a numerous and distinctive class, see Taylor, 419 U.S. at 537, 95 S.Ct. 692, or a "gross deviation" between the percentage of class members in jury venires and the percentage of class members in the community from which petit juries are drawn, see Duren, 439 U.S. at 366, 99 S.Ct. 664.
Apart from needlessly going where even angels should fear to tread, however, the majority's discussion of the notion of statistical significance I find to be particularly problematic, both for suggesting that it functions as a measurement of underrepre-sentation at all, and for blurring the distinction between invidious discrimination and a fair cross-section violation. I understand the concept of statistical significance to de-seribe the likelihood that an observed difference between two samples, or groups, occurred by chance. Although the Supreme Court has obliquely suggested that the statistical significance of a disparity between jury representation and representation in the population at large may be relevant to the question of intentional discrimination, see Castaneda v. Partida, 430 U.S. 482, 496 n. 17, 97 S.Ct. 1272, 51 LEd.2d 498 (1977), nowhere has it suggested that the .01 or .05 levels of significance typically used by social scientists in any way establishes invidious discrimination, much less unfair or unreasonable underrepresentation. In fact, if not completely irrelevant, statistical significance, as a measurement of randomness, can have only the most indirect and minimal relevance to the evaluation of underrepresentation.
By addressing statistical significance as it does, however, the majority conflates the elements of the Sixth Amendment fair cross-section requirement and the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibition against invidious discrimination. In Taylor, the Supreme Court did not strip from the equal protection analysis the requirement to show intentional discrimination, as I believe the majority suggests. Rather, it found in the Sixth Amendment a separate entitlement to a jury selected from a fair cross-section of the community. 419 U.S. at 697-98, 95 S.Ct. 719. While underrepresentation that is at least not de minimus must result from intentional discrimination in the selection process for it to violate equal protection, the Supreme Court has never attempted to describe, in numerical terms, the degree of underrepre-sentation that would be constitutionally unfair or unreasonable; and despite the majority's statistical exploration, neither does it. I believe it is clear, however, that the "substantial underrepresentation" constituting a constitutional violation when it results from purposeful discrimination, see Castaneda, 430 U.S. at 493, 97 S.Ct. 1272, is not also the measure of a discrepancy sufficient to satisfy the second prong of the fair cross-section requirement, see Duren, 439 U.S. at 364-66, 99 S.Ct. 664.
Finally, although there may be many good reasons for discontinuing Arapahoe County's practice of giving credit for Aurora municipal jury service, I am concerned about the ma*608jority's choice to do so in this case. Because it declines to consider whether this practice violates the statutory requirements for jury selection, and it expressly finds that Arapahoe's practice does not result in unconstitutional underrepresentation, the basis of its mandate remains unclear to me: I would strongly disagree with a suggestion that any procedure resulting in the underrepresentation of a distinctive group, regardless of the extent of that underrepresentation or its justification by other significant state interests, amounts to constitutional error, even if harmless. Similarly, although courts have great discretion in the jury selection process and must ensure the fairness of individual trials, I do not believe the supervisory powers of this court extend as far as regulating the Jury commissioner or disregarding statutorily prescribed procedures not yet shown to be unconstitutional.
In the absence of prescribing some numerical benchmarks, which I concede would be a mistake, I fail to see how the majority's endorsement of various statistical techniques advances the inquiry or assists trial courts in this jurisdiction. Without attempting to explain their individual relevance, the majority appears to hold merely that no measurement technique may be discarded, whatever it may actually measure. For my part, it seems clear that the minimal underrepresentation resulting from this selection process is facially reasonable, just as the deviations found to be impermissible in Taylor and Duren were facially unfair and unreasonable.
I therefore agree only that the jury selection process in these two cases did not violate the fair cross-section requirement of the Sixth Amendment.
I am authorized to state that JUSTICE EID joins in this opinion concurring in the judgment only.

. The prosecution did not stipulate to the validity of the defense expert's methodology or the accuracy of his data, nor did the district court make any such finding, instead merely ruling that the numbers provided by the expert did not demonstrate a violation of the Sixth Amendment. *607Among other things, the expert did not explain precisely how he arrived at figures for minority representation in the Arapahoe jury wheel, and his testimony actually seemed to concede that no such data was given him by the jury commissioner. This methodological omission appears to be more than academic because, as the majority notes, the Arapahoe procedure was radically altered in March, only months before the defendants' trials, reintegrating prospective jurors from the Aurora jury wheel, who had previously been completely excluded from the Arapahoe jury wheel, and instead merely giving service credit to those who actually served as jurors in Aurora.