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Unanimous Court in Berghuis v. Smith upholds conviction
A unanimous United States Supreme Court has overturned a federal appeals court ruling which had held a murder conviction invalid because the racial makeup of the pool varied from that of the community where the trial was held. The decision in the Michigan case of Berghuis v. Smith found that the lower court had erred in concluding that there was a systematic exclusion of blacks in the state’s process for summoning citizens for jury duty.
The California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation had joined the case to encourage a decision overturning the lower court. The Foundation contended 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 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 Rumbley 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.
When the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear Michigan’s appeal of that ruling, CJLF joined the case, filing a scholarly amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief arguing that the Constitution only prohibits intentional discrimination. The state court was therefore correct that the jury commissioner need not compensate for naturally occurring differences.
In the Court’s unanimous opinion, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg writes, “In Taylor, we ‘recognized broad discretion in the States’ to ‘prescribe relevant qualifications for their jurors and to provide reasonable exemptions.’... And in Duren, the Court understood that hardship exemptions resembling those Smith assails might well ‘survive a fair-cross-section challenge.’... In sum, the Michigan Supreme Court’s decision rejecting Smith’s fair-cross-section claim is consistent with Duren and ‘involved [no] unreasonable application o[f] clearly established Federal law,’ ” (the standard set by Congress for a lower federal court to overturn a state criminal judgment).
“Today’s decision preserves the flexibility necessary for states to implement a color-blind process for summoning people for jury service, without requiring counties to force single mothers and those without transportation to serve merely to fill a quota,” said Foundation Legal Director Kent Scheidegger.