SUPREME COURT REVERSES GRANT OF HABEAS CORPUS DESPITE ALL WHITE JURY

The Supreme Court in Berghuis v. Smith looked at an appeal from a grant of habeas corpus in which the question, again, is not whether the trial court was right or wrong but rather whether the state court decision “resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States,”

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA)

“prohibits federal habeas relief unless the state court’s adjudication ‘resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States,’. . . or ‘resulted in a decision that was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding,’”

In Smith the issue is whether Diapolis Smith, an African American, was denied his Sixth Amendment right to a jury consisting of a cross section of the population. He was convicted of murder by an all white jury in Kent County, Michigan. The lower courts in finding a constitutional violation cited Duren v. Missouri in which the Supreme Court developed a three part test “a criminal defendant must make to establish a prima facie violation of the Sixth Amendment’s fair-cross-section requirement:

(1) that the group alleged to be excluded is a ‘distinctive’ group in the community; (2) that the representation of this group in venires from which juries are selected is not fair and reasonable in relation to the number of such persons in the community; and (3) that this underrepresentation is due to systematic exclusion of the group in the jury-selection process.

In Duren the underrepresented group was woman. The court found that women made up 54 per cent of the jury-eligible population but only 14.5 per cent of the weekly venires. In contrast the court in Smith found that African Americans in Kent County made up 7.28 per cent of the jury eligible population but only six per cent of the jury pool. In Duren the law did not require women to sit on juries. They were allowed to exclude themselves and if they did not answer jury summons they were assumed to have excluded themselves. Contrasting this to the system in Kent County where Smith claimed that the jury selection system which gave priority to the District Courts and allowed them to get first choice at minorities instead of the Circuit Court which tried felonies such as that with which he was charged.

But the Supreme Court did not find that the alleged discrimination in Kent County violated any “clearly established” decision of the Supreme Court. The figures in Duren cannot be compared to the figures in Smith. The Supreme Court has given the states wide discretion in determining how to meet constitutional jury requirements and no Supreme Court precedent clearly supports the Sixth Circuit decision supporting the granting of the writ of habeas corpus.