Mitchell v. State
| Decision Date | 02 May 1988 |
| Docket Number | No. CR,CR |
| Citation | 750 S.W.2d 936,295 Ark. 341 |
| Parties | Lonnie MITCHELL, Appellant, v. STATE of Arkansas, Appellee. 87-155. |
| Court | Arkansas Supreme Court |
Shermer and Walker, Russellville, for appellant.
R.B. Friedlander, Sol. Gen., Little Rock, for appellee.
The appellant, Lonnie Mitchell, was convicted of kidnapping, rape, and battery resulting from a single incident. He received separate life sentences on the kidnapping and rape convictions and thirty years imprisonment on the battery conviction. We must reverse the convictions because of error which occurred in the selection of the jury. We will address some of the other points raised for reversal in case they arise upon retrial.
The victim was a young white female who testified that, while driving her car home from her boyfriend's apartment at 2:30 a.m. on June 4, 1986, she heard a call for help from the vicinity of a car that appeared to be stuck in a ditch. She stopped, thinking someone might have been hurt. A person she later identified as Mitchell, a black man eighteen years old at the time, approached her and asked her to use her car to pull his from the ditch. She declined but offered to take him to the police station. He refused that offer, but he got in her car, after reaching through the open window to unlock the door, and gave the victim directions supposedly to the place where he lived. They wound up in a cul-de-sac behind a grocery store where he asked her to engage in sexual intercourse with him. She refused, and he then brutally beat and raped her.
In the process of selecting the petit jury, the sole black venireman, Roger Petty, was questioned as follows:
At that point, the inquiry turned to racially oriented questions and was as follows:
Thereafter, defense counsel asked some questions as follows:
Then the following occurred:
Mitchell contends that the exclusion of the only black juror, leaving an all-white panel, made a prima facie case of discrimination and that the action of the trial court did not rise to the level of a "sensitive inquiry" in these circumstances as is required by the Supreme Court's decision in Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 106 S.Ct. 1712, 90 L.Ed.2d 69 (1986), and ours in Ward v. State, 293 Ark. 88, 733 S.W.2d 728 (1987). In response, the state's brief argues that the trial judge was unconvinced there was discrimination and that the prosecutor "stated his reasons" for excusing Petty. Linell v. State, 283 Ark. 162, 671 S.W.2d 741 (1984), is cited for the proposition that the trial judge is better able to weigh the demeanor of a prospective juror and thus may exercise his discretion in jury selection. While we agree with that general proposition and the applicability of it in cases like the Linell case where the question was whether a juror should have been dismissed for cause, the record here does not show that the trial court made the kind of evaluation, required by the Batson and Ward cases, of the prosecution's use of its peremptory challenge.
In Swain v. Alabama, 380 U.S. 202, 85 S.Ct. 824, 13 L.Ed.2d 759 (1965), the Supreme Court held that, to succeed, an allegation of racial discrimination in jury selection must be based upon a "pattern" of discriminatory use of peremptory challenges established by reference to several cases. That holding was superseded by the decision in the Batson case in which the Supreme Court found that the old test placed a "crippling burden of proof" on a defendant, thus effectively placing the prosecution's peremptory challenges beyond scrutiny. The Supreme Court recognized that "[a] single invidiously discriminatory governmental act" is not "immunized by the absence of such discrimination in the making of other comparable decisions," quoting from Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Corp., 429 U.S. 252, at 266, n. 15, 97 S.Ct. 555, 564 n. 15, 50 L.Ed.2d 450 (1977), which involved selection of the venire.
In the Ward case we summarized the constitutional test applied in the Batson decision as follows:
In Batson, the court held that a defendant who could make a prima facie case of purposeful discrimination shifts the burden to the state to prove the exclusion of jurors is not based on race. This prima facie case may be made by "showing that the totality of the relevant facts gives rise to an inference of discriminatory purpose." Another way is to demonstrate 'total or seriously disproportionate exclusion of Negroes from jury venires." Another example for making a prima facie case is by showing a "pattern" of strikes, or questions and statements by a prosecuting attorney during voir dire. [293 at 92-93, 733 S.W.2d at 730]
Mitchell made a prima facie case of discrimination in the prosecution's use of its peremptory challenge to remove the only black prospective juror after questioning him closely on whether his race would affect his vote. Absent inquiry by the court, we have before us no factual determination whether the prosecutor was assuming Mr. Petty could not withstand the racial pressures and thus assuming he could not have been answering...
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MacKintrush v. State
...into the direct and circumstantial evidence available to decide if the State had made an adequate explanation. See Mitchell v. State, 295 Ark. 341, 750 S.W.2d 936 (1988); Ward v. State, 293 Ark. 88, 733 S.W.2d 728 (1987). Later, however, that requirement was modified as We now hold that upo......
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Williams v. State
...this Court should adopt the more sound rule which the Arkansas Supreme Court recently adopted in its case of Mitchell v. State, 295 Ark. 341, 750 S.W.2d 936 (Sup.Ct.1988), that "[W]here the use of a peremptory challenge results in exclusion from the jury of all members of the defendant's mi......
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Peters v. State
...to the record to try and discern if the outcome of the case was really changed by the improper testimony. In Mitchell v. State, 295 Ark. 341, 750 S.W.2d 936 (1988), the issue was whether Mitchell was denied his right to a fair and impartial jury by the exclusion of the only black juror. The......
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Cox v State
...a Batson challenge. Among the cases defining what is required to make a prima facie showing of discrimination are: 1. Mitchell v. State, 295 Ark. 341, 750 S.W.2d 936(1988), where we Where the use of a peremptory challenge excludes from the jury all members of the defendant's minority race, ......