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Supreme Court rules defendant's right to impartial jury not violated

By Bernard Hibbitts (editor) and University of Pittsburgh School of Law students.

[JURIST] The US Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled unanimously in Berghuis v. Smith that a defendant's Sixth Amendment right to a jury drawn from a fair cross-section of the community was not violated when the African-American representation on the jury was disproportionate to the community population. The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit applied the comparative-disparity test, which calculates the percentage of otherwise eligible jurors from a given group who are excluded from jury service, and held that the defendant's right was violated. In reversing the decision below, the court declined to adopt an explicit standard. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote:Each test is imperfect. Absolute disparity and comparative disparity measurements, courts have recognized, can be misleading when, as here, "members of the distinctive group comp a small percentage of those eligible for jury service." And to our knowledge, "o court ... has accepted alone as determinative in Sixth Amendment challenges to jury selection systems."Justice Clarence Thomas filed a concurring opinion. The defendant, Diapolis Smith, is an African-American convicted of second-degree murder by an all-white jury in Kent County, Michigan in 1993. At the time of Smith's trial, African-Americans constituted 7.28 percent of Kent County's jury-eligible population, and 6 percent of the pool from which potential jurors were drawn.

Full post as published by JURIST - The Paper Chase on March 30, 2010 (boomark / email).