Court Opinion

ID: 9755776
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 20:50:03.267364+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:56:00.801518
License: Public Domain

*78WILNER, Chief Judge,
concurring.
I heartily concur in the panel’s decision and in the Opinion authored by Judge Bloom.
My purpose in writing separately is solely to suggest that, if Batson and its Federal and State progeny are to remain as governing principles in jury selection, we need to consider the continued viability of peremptory challenges. In making this comment, I do not mean to criticize either Batson or the cases that have followed or extended it. They rest on solid, fundamental principles of public policy. Nor do I deprecate in any way the intrinsic value of peremptory challenges, which have long been regarded as ah important — indeed vital — mechanism for assuring a fair jury in both civil and criminal proceedings. The problem is that the two are finding it increasingly difficult to coexist and, as the quoted colloquy in this case indicates, precious judicial time and resources are being sidetracked into resolving the conflict between them.
We are at the point now, at least in Maryland, where it is impermissible to exercise a peremptory strike on the basis of race, gender, and, I expect, ethnic origin. Because the underpinning of this impermissibility is the Constitutional right to equal protection of the law (coupled in Maryland with the State Equal Rights Amendment), as Judge Moylan recognized in Mejia v. State, 90 Md.App. 31, 35, 599 A.2d 1207, vacated and remanded, 328 Md. 522, 616 A.2d 356 (1992), logic “compellingly requires that its strictures be used against any other cognizable group.” Congress has already, by statute, declared certain forms of discrimination against older persons and persons with disabilities to be against national public policy. Are these categories too to be protected against discrimination in jury selection? Will it be impermissible to strike a prospective juror because he or she is over 55 or is disabled? Religious discrimination is also Constitutionally impermissible. Can a juror be struck because of his or her religion, or lack thereof?
Occasionally, the Supreme Court starts a march that, years later, it realizes has led it into a swamp, and it reverses *79course. It may be too early yet to know whether that will happen here, but I suspect that it will not. We then may have to face the prospect that, in a seriously contested case, no peremptory challenge will go unchallenged, that counsel will be called upon to explain the basis of every one, that the court will then have to consider (1) whether the reason advanced by counsel falls within the dramatically reduced scope of allowable ones, and (2) even if, facially, it does, whether the reason asserted is merely pretextual. A whole new area of appellate review will blossom; indeed, the buds are already growing.
I recognize that the abolition of peremptory challenges would mark a dramatic change in the way our jury system has traditionally operated, and, if we were to do that, we would need to be more liberal in allowing challenges for cause and in permitting voir dire examination for the purpose of making those challenges. The question is whether that would be more, or less, efficient and whether it would produce a more fair, or less fair, result than the hoops we need to jump through now under Batson and its children. I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it is a question we urgently need to address.