Anaya v. Hansen

• Decision Date: 09 January 1986
• Docket Number: No. 84-1625,84-1625
• Citation: 781 F.2d 1
• Parties: 19 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 1190 Linda ANAYA, Petitioner, Appellant, v. Edward J. HANSEN, Superintendent, Maine Correctional Center, et al., Respondents, Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 1

781 F.2d 1

19 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 1190

Linda ANAYA, Petitioner, Appellant, v. Edward J. HANSEN, Superintendent, Maine Correctional Center et al., Respondents, Appellees.

No. 84-1625.

United States Court of Appeals First Circuit.

Argued May 9, 1985.

Decided Jan. 9, 1986.

Ralph W. Brown, Portland, Me., for appellant.

Nicholas M. Gess, Asst. Atty. Gen., with whom James E. Tierney, Atty. Gen., Augusta, Me., Eric E. Wright, Brunswick, Me., and Charles K. Leadbetter, Asst. Atty. Gen., Criminal Div., Appellate Section, Augusta, Me., were on brief for appellees.

Before CAMPBELL, Chief Judge, VAN DUSEN, ^* Senior Circuit Judge, and BOWNES, Circuit Judge.

LEVIN H. CAMPBELL, Chief Judge.

This is an appeal from the denial of the habeas corpus petition of Linda Anaya. The primary question raised is whether blue collar workers, less educated individuals, and young adults constitute "cognizable" or "distinctive" groups under the test set forth by the Supreme Court in Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357, 364, 99 S.Ct. 664, 668, 58 L.Ed.2d 579 (1979), such that a mere showing of statistical underrepresentation of such persons on the venire in comparison to their representation in the community as a whole will indicate a prima facie violation of the sixth amendment. We hold that, under the principles set forth by this circuit in Barber v. Ponte, 772 F.2d 982 (1985) (en banc), it would be inappropriate to take judicial notice that any of these groups are "cognizable" for Duren purposes. Therefore, we affirm.

I. FACTS

Shortly after midnight on April 9, 1980, police in Cumberland County, Maine, responded to a report of a stabbing in the apartment of petitioner Linda Anaya. When they arrived at the scene, the police found Anaya stroking the head of her boyfriend, Frank Williams, as he lay dying of a knife wound to the back.

A Cumberland County grand jury subsequently returned an indictment charging Anaya with the murder of Williams. Because Anaya was indigent, counsel was appointed for her. Before trial, Anaya moved to dismiss the indictment on the ground that the grand and petit juries were drawn from a pool that did not fairly represent a cross section of her community, and moved for the appointment of experts to study, at public expense, the juror selection process in Cumberland County. Both motions were denied.

Anaya was convicted of manslaughter after trial before a Cumberland County jury. On appeal, however, the Maine Supreme Court reversed her conviction, due to the failure of the trial judge to permit a psychologist and a medical doctor to testify about the "battered wife syndrome." State v. Anaya, 438 A.2d 892 (Me.1981).

Before her second trial, Anaya successfully moved in the Maine Superior Court for the appointment of a sociologist as an expert witness to examine the nature of the grand and petit jury pools in Cumberland County and for "reasonable compensation" for the witness. She also successfully moved for copies of questionnaires that had been sent out and returned by members of the 1980-81 and 1981-82 Cumberland County jury pools. Approximately nine weeks later, and less than two weeks before the date set for her second trial, Anaya moved for appointment of an expert statistician to help the sociologist analyze the composition of Cumberland County jury pools and for more than $30,000 for expert analysis of the pools. The superior court granted her $500 to pursue this analysis.

On the day petitioner was arraigned and scheduled to begin trial, defense counsel asked the court to continue the trial until a "new and properly constituted" jury pool could be drawn from which petitioner's jury could be selected. Anaya then attempted to show that Cumberland County's juror selection system produced jury pools that failed to contain a cross section of the community from which they were drawn because persons aged 18-24, blue collar workers, and persons with less than a high school education were significantly underrepresented in recent county jury pools. The superior court denied the jury pool challenge.

Anaya was then convicted of manslaughter. She again appealed to the Maine Supreme Court, this time emphasizing her jury pool challenge and appealing the superior court's denial of additional funds with which to study the composition of the Cumberland County jury pools. The Maine Supreme Court found that Anaya had not made the requisite factual showing that young adults between the ages of 18 and 24, blue collar workers, or less educated persons constituted cognizable classes within her community and therefore denied her sixth amendment challenge. The Maine Supreme Court also denied Anaya's appeal for additional funds to pursue her jury pool challenge on the ground that Anaya did not show that failure to award the funds significantly prejudiced her. State v. Anaya, 456 A.2d 1255 (Me.1983).

Having exhausted her state remedies, Anaya sought a writ of habeas corpus from the United States District Court for the District of Maine. The district court dismissed the petition and denied a certificate of probable cause. We granted a certificate of probable cause to allow Anaya to appeal from the decision of the district court.

II. THE FAIR CROSS-SECTION REQUIREMENT

The sixth amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees a criminal defendant a trial "by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed." ¹ The amendment has been interpreted to guarantee a criminal defendant a jury "drawn from a source fairly representative of the community." Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 538, 95 S.Ct. 692, 701, 42 L.Ed.2d 690 (1975). In order to establish a prima facie violation of this "fair cross-section" requirement, a petitioner must show (1) that the group alleged to be excluded is a "cognizable" or "distinctive" group within the community; ² (2) that the representation of this group is not fair and reasonable in relation to the number of such persons in the community; and (3) that the underrepresentation is inherent in the system used to select the jury pools or venires. Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357, 364, 99 S.Ct. 664, 668, 58 L.Ed.2d 579 (1979). There is no requirement that the defendant be a member of the "distinctive" group allegedly excluded from the venires. Taylor, 419 U.S. at 526, 95 S.Ct. at 695.

Anaya alleges that three cognizable groups have been systematically underrepresented in Cumberland County jury pools: young persons aged 18-24; blue collar workers, and persons with less than a high school education. ³

A. Young Adults

The first of these claims falls as a result of our recent decision in Barber v. Ponte, 772 F.2d 982 (1st Cir.1985) (en banc). In that case, we held that "young adults" do not constitute a "cognizable group" so as to satisfy the first prong of the three-part Duren test. While in Barber "young adults" were described as persons between the ages of 18 and 34, our analysis there applies equally forcefully to the age range presented in the instant case.

B. Blue Collar Workers

Petitioner contends that a 1946 Supreme Court decision, Thiel v. Southern Pacific Co., 328 U.S. 217, 66 S.Ct. 984, 90 L.Ed. 1181 (1946), requires a different result regarding blue collar workers. We disagree.

Thiel was a negligence suit against a railroad. The injured plaintiff moved to strike the jury panel on the ground that "mostly business executives or those having the employer's viewpoint are purposely selected on said panel[.]" The district court denied his motion, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. The Supreme Court reversed, holding that systematic exclusion of daily wage earners from jury lists violated "the general principles underlying proper jury selection." The Court said:

[T]he pay period of a particular individual is completely irrelevant to his eligibility and capacity to serve as a juror. Wage earners, including those who are paid by the day, constitute a very substantial portion of the community, a portion that cannot be intentionally and systematically excluded in whole or in part without doing violence to the democratic nature of the jury system. Were we to sanction an exclusion of this nature we would encourage whatever desires those responsible for the selection of the jury panels may have to discriminate against persons of low economic and social status. We would breathe life into any latent tendencies to establish the jury as the instrument of the economically and socially privileged. That we refuse to do.

Id., 328 U.S. at 223-24, 66 S.Ct. at 987 (footnote omitted).

Thiel nevertheless cannot be read as mandating that blue collar workers are a "cognizable group" as that term was used in Duren, such that a mere showing of statistical underrepresentation, with little more, indicates a prima facie violation of the sixth amendment. In Thiel, there was uncontroverted evidence that wage earners were deliberately discriminated against; "[b]oth the clerk of the court and the jury commissioner testified that they deliberately and intentionally excluded from the jury lists all persons who work for a daily wage." Thiel, 328 U.S. at 221, 66 S.Ct. at 986 (emphasis added). The case did not involve a mere showing that certain types of occupations were statistically underrepresented on the venire, the issue before us in the present case. The requirement that a jury be drawn from a cross section of the community, wrote the Court,

does not mean, of course, that every jury must contain representatives of all the economic, social, religious, racial, political and geographic groups of the community; frequently such complete representation would be impossible. But it does mean that prospective jurors shall be selected by court officials without systematic and intentional exclusion of any of these groups.

Thiel, 328 U.S. at 220, 66 S.Ct. at 985 (emphasis added).

In Barber v. Ponte, 772 F.2d 982 (1st Cir.1985) (en banc), we distinguished between deliberate...