State v. Adams

533 So. 2d 1060, 1988 WL 113207
Louisiana Court of Appeal·Decided October 27, 1988·No. KA-8991·Published·Cited by 24 cases

Opinion

533 So.2d 1060 (1988)

STATE of Louisiana
v.
Sandra ADAMS.

No. KA-8991.

Court of Appeal of Louisiana, Fourth Circuit.

October 27, 1988.

Harry F. Connick, Dist. Atty., Sandra Pettle, Asst. Dist. Atty. of Orleans Parish, for appellee.

Bryan Pedeaux, New Orleans, for defendant-appellant.

Before BYRNES, WILLIAMS and PLOTKIN, JJ.

WILLIAMS, Judge.

This criminal appeal from a female defendant's conviction for solicitation with intent to commit unnatural carnal copulation concerns the State's use of its peremptory challenges to exclude males from the jury panel, which defendant contends is a violation of her Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment Rights.

Defendant claims she was denied a fair trial by a jury drawn from a fair cross-section of the population and equal protection of the law because the prosecution used its peremptory challenges to exclude men from her jury. We disagree and affirm defendant's conviction because the Sixth Amendment does not require a petit jury to reflect a cross-section of the community, *1061 Lockhart v. McCree, 476 U.S. 162, 106 S.Ct. 1758, 90 L.Ed.2d 137 (1986), and under the circumstances, the State's use of its peremptory challenges was not prohibited discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. We decline to extend the rule of Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 106 S.Ct. 1712, 90 L.Ed.2d 69 (1986), which prohibits the State from using its peremptory challenges in a racially discriminatory manner, by prohibiting the State from exercising its peremptory challenges to eliminate all males from a female defendant's petit jury.

FACTS

Defendant, Sandra Adams, was charged by bill of information with violating LSA-R.S. 14:89, by soliciting Detective Jusselin with the intent to engage in unnatural carnal copulation in the amount of twenty dollars. In selecting the petit jury, the prosecutor used five of her six peremptory challenges to strike prospective male jurors. Interspersed with the prosecutor's use of her peremptory challenges, the defendant used all six of her peremptory challenges to dismiss only women from the venire. The result was a jury composed solely of women. After the jurors were sworn, the defendant objected to the composition of the jury and moved for a mistrial.[1] The trial court denied the motion without holding an evidentiary hearing.

Following the presentation of overwhelming evidence establishing defendant's guilt for the offense charged, the jury convicted defendant of violating LSA-R.S. 14:89. Thereafter, the defendant filed a motion for post verdict judgment of acquittal, which the trial court denied. Defendant waived all delays and the court sentenced her to serve six (6) months in the parish prison, suspended the sentence and placed her on active probation of one (1) year.

ASSIGNMENT OF ERROR

Defendant claims that her Equal Protection Rights have been violated as gender is an improper criterion upon which the state may exercise its peremptory challenges. In support of her argument, defendant relies upon Article 1, Sec. 3 of the Louisiana Constitution of 1974, which provides that no law shall discriminate against a person because of race and that no law shall arbitrarily, capriciously or unreasonably discriminate against a person because of their sex. She also relies upon Louisiana Rules of Court, Supreme Court Rule XXV, which provides that all litigants entitled to a jury trial have a right to a jury selected from a full cross-section of the population, and forbids exclusion of jurors based upon "race, color, religion, sex, national origin or economic status." These provisions, however, are not dispositive to the issues presented.

These provisions are directed to the composition of the jury venire from which the petit jury is eventually selected, mandating that an entire class of individuals cannot be excluded from a jury venire. The rule is often referred to as the fair cross-section requirement of the Sixth Amendment. Defendant's appeal, however, questions whether her constitutional and/or statutory rights are violated when the prosecution uses its peremptory challenges to exclude all the men from her petit jury after the jury venire is chosen from a cross-section of the community.

As a general rule, a defendant has no right to trial by any particular jury or juror, but only to a trial by a competent, impartial jury. State v. Stephenson, 291 So.2d 767, 768 (La.1974); State v. Simms, 465 So.2d 769 (La.App. 5th Cir.1985). Consequently, after the jury venire has been chosen from a cross-section of the community, the fair cross-section principle has never been extended to invalidate a petit *1062 jury due to the prosecutor's exercise of peremptory challenges to the prospective petit jurors.

The United States Supreme Court in Lockhart v. McCree, 476 U.S. 162, 106 S.Ct. 1758, 1764-1765, 90 L.Ed.2d 137 (1986), refused to extend the fair cross-section requirement to petit jury selections:

...We have never invoked the fair cross-section principle to invalidate the use of either for-cause or peremptory challenges to prospective jurors, or to require petit juries, as opposed to jury panels or venires, to reflect the composition of the community at large. See Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357, 363-364, 99 S.Ct. 664, 668, 58 L.Ed.2d 579 (1979); Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 538, 95 S.Ct. 692, 701-02, 42 L.Ed.2d 690 (1975) ("[W]e impose no requirement that petit juries actually chosen must mirror the community and reflect the various distinctive groups in the population"); cf. Batson v. Kentucky [476] U.S. [79], [84], n. 4, 106 S.Ct. 1712, 1716, n. 4, 90 L.Ed.2d [69] (1986) (expressly declining to address "fair cross-section" challenge to discriminatory use of peremptory challenges). The limited scope of the fair cross-section requirement is a direct and inevitable consequence of the practical impossibility of providing each criminal defendant with a truly "representative" petit jury, see id., at [85], n. 6, 106 S.Ct., at 1717, n. 6, ... See United States v. Childress, 715 F.2d 1313 (CA8 1983) (en banc), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 1063, 104 S.Ct. 744, 79 L.Ed.2d 202 (1984); Pope v. United States, 372 F.2d 710, 725 (CA8 1967) (Blackmun, J.) ("The point at which an accused is entitled to a fair cross-section of the community is when the names are put in the box from which the panels are drawn ") vacated on other grounds, 392 U.S. 651, 88 S.Ct. 2145, 20 L.Ed.2d 1317 (1968). 106 S.Ct. at 1764-1765. (emphasis added)

Likewise, we reject defendant's suggestion that the fair-cross section requirement of the Sixth Amendment should be extended to the selection of petit juries. This determination, however, does not end our inquiry into whether the State's exercise of its peremptory challenges to eliminate the male jurors from the female defendant's petit jury constituted prohibited discr

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