The United States Supreme Court will hear oral argument Wednesday regarding the racial makeup of the pools from which juries are selected. In the case of Berghuis v. Smith, a federal appeals court ruling overturned a murder conviction because the racial makeup of the pool varied from that of the community where the trial was held, although there was no evidence that the variation was the result of intentional discrimination. The high court will decide if the “fair cross-section” requirement, announced in 1975 in Taylor v. Louisiana, forces this result.
The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation has joined the case to encourage a decision overturning the lower court. CJLF contends that valid, nondiscriminatory selection practices do not violate any right of the defendant, even if they have an incidental and unintended impact on the racial composition of the jury pool.
“The Equal Protection Clause has been a very effective weapon against discrimination in the selection of jurors,” said Foundation Legal Director Kent Scheidegger. “The additional cross-section requirement does nothing to improve the fairness of trials. It is often contrary to other important goals, including obtaining responsible jurors and lessening the burden of jury selection on those least able to bear it,” he added.
The case involves the 1993 second-degree murder conviction of Diapolis Smith for killing a man two years earlier. On the evening of November 7, 1991, in a bar in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Smith shot Christopher Rumbly once in the chest, killing him. The same bullet wounded a bouncer who was attempting to break up the fight. The jury convicted Smith, and he was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.
On appeal, Smith claimed that his Sixth Amendment right to a venire (jury pool) representing a fair-cross-section of the community was violated because the percentage of blacks who appeared for jury service was lower than the percentage of blacks living in Kent County, Michigan. The Michigan Court of Appeals remanded the case to the trial court for an evidentiary hearing on the claim.
The court found that the population utilized for jury selection consisted of persons who have been issued a driver’s license or state identification card. The Secretary of State would then select, at random, a percentage of the names from the list and transmit them to the County Administrator. Neither the master list, nor the list transmitted to the county, indicated the race of those selected.
The trial court concluded that there was no Sixth Amendment violation in the jury selection for Smith’s trial. The Michigan Court of Appeals reversed that holding, but it was later overturned by a 2000 Michigan Supreme Court decision which noted that Smith had failed to show a “systematic exclusion” of blacks in the jury pool.
In 2006, a Federal District Court on habeas corpus rejected Smith’s challenge to the Michigan Supreme Court decision. Two years later, a panel of the Federal Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Smith’s conviction, announcing that the Michigan Supreme Court decision was an unreasonable application of federal law.
The ruling found that the state court’s practice of granting liberal excuses from jury service for childcare and transportation hardship had a disparate impact, because relatively more blacks than whites had such hardships. The state supreme court had held that the impact of such naturally occurring differences was not “systematic exclusion” within the meaning of the fair cross-section requirement. The Federal Court of Appeals disagreed and further held that the state court had made an “unreasonable application” of U. S. Supreme Court precedent, a condition imposed by Congress in 1996 for a lower federal court to overturn a decision of a state court.
Earlier this year, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear Michigan’s appeal of that ruling. CJLF has joined the case to argue that the Court’s 1975 holding in Taylor v. Louisiana created a Sixth Amendment right to a cross-section of the community although there is no mention of this right in the Amendment and no support for it in previous Supreme Court decisions.
The Foundation’s scholarly amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief notes that Supreme Court precedent and federal law have relied on the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to develop effective rules prohibiting any intentional discrimination in the selection of jurors. Although the requirement that a jury pool mirror the local population has little to do with the reliability of a jury verdict, it will require counties to force single mothers and those without transportation to serve on juries. The Foundation is asking the Court to abandon the requirement.
