State v. Langley

• Decision Date: 03 April 2002
• Docket Number: No. 95-KA-1489.,95-KA-1489.
• Citation: 813 So.2d 356
• Parties: STATE of Louisiana v. Ricky Joseph LANGLEY.
• Court: Louisiana Supreme Court

813 So.2d 356

STATE of Louisiana v. Ricky Joseph LANGLEY.

No. 95-KA-1489.

Supreme Court of Louisiana.

April 3, 2002.

Clive Adrian Stafford Smith, R. Neal Walker, New Orleans, Counsel for Applicant.

Richard P. Ieyoub, Attorney General, Robert "Rick" Bryant, District Attorney, Frederick W. Frey, Vernon E. McGuire, III, Lake Charles, Carla S. Sigler, Mike K. Stratton, Paul P. Reggie, Lake Charles, Counsel for Respondent.

CALOGERO, Chief Justice.¹

Compelled by respect for the United States Supreme Court's decision in Campbell v. Louisiana, 523 U.S. 392, 118 S.Ct. 1419, 140 L.Ed.2d 551 (1998), this court, after affirming Ricky Langley's conviction and sentence to death, granted in part his application for rehearing and remanded the case to the district court for an evidentiary hearing and a determination as to whether there had been intentional discrimination on the basis of race and/or gender in the selection of the foreperson for the grand jury that indicted Langley in 1992 in Calcasieu Parish. State v. Langley, 95-1489 (La.4/14/98), 711 So.2d 651, 675 (on rehearing). After conducting that hearing, the district court found that the defendant had established a prima facie case of intentional discrimination, which the State failed to rebut. For the reasons that follow, we affirm the district court's ruling granting the defendant's motion to quash the indictment.

FACTS AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY

In 1992, a Calcasieu Parish Grand Jury indicted the defendant for first degree murder. Following a 1994 trial, a jury found the defendant guilty as charged, and unanimously sentenced him to death. On original hearing in State v. Langley, supra,

this Court affirmed his conviction and sentence of death. In an unpublished appendix, we addressed the defendant's claim that the district court had improperly denied without a hearing his pretrial motion to quash the indictment on grounds of racial discrimination generally in the selection of grand jury forepersons in Calcasieu Parish and specifically in the selection of the grand jury that had indicted him. Our resolution of the issue relied in part on our prior decision in State v. Campbell, 95-0824 (La.10/2/95), 661 So.2d 1321, which held that a white defendant lacked standing to raise equal protection claims involving discrimination against African-Americans in the selection of grand juries. One week after this Court rendered its opinion in Langley, the United States Supreme Court reversed our decision in State v. Campbell, and held that a white defendant does have third-party standing to raise claims of racial discrimination in the selection of the grand jury that indicted him. Campbell v. Louisiana, 523 U.S. at 400, 118 S.Ct. at 1424. The defendant immediately moved for rehearing, and in June 1998, this Court granted the motion in part and remanded the case to the district court for an evidentiary hearing in light of that very recent United States Supreme Court opinion in Campbell v. Louisiana. Langley, 95-1489, 711 So.2d at 675.

During the summer of 2000, the district court conducted the evidentiary hearing as ordered. In March 2001, the district court issued a judgment finding that the state had failed to rebut a prima facie case of discrimination made by the defendant and that the indictment must be quashed, thereby upsetting the conviction and ordering further proceedings. The State now seeks review of the district court's ruling².

At the time of the defendant's indictment in 1992, Calcasieu Parish followed the system of grand jury foreperson selection prescribed in La. Code Crim. Proc. art. 413(B), before it was amended in 1999.³ Prior to amendment, the article called for the district court to select one person from the grand jury venire to serve as the foreperson of the grand jury. Then, pursuant to former Article 413(B), the sheriff would draw "indiscriminately and by lot from the envelope containing the remaining names on the grand jury venire a sufficient number of names to complete the grand jury." La. Code Crim. Proc. art. 413(B) (West 1991). The foreperson votes as any other juror. Thus, when a judge in Louisiana chose a foreperson, he also selected one member of the grand jury panel outside of the random draw used to compose the balance of the panel. In the instant case, the foreperson from the grand jury that indicted the defendant was a white male.

After remand from this court, the district court held an evidentiary hearing conducted on June 29, 2000, July 20, 2000, and August 10, 2000. The relevant time period to be examined was identified as the twenty-two-year period commencing March 27, 1972, and running through June 23, 1994, the year in which the defendant was tried. During that period, 49 grand juries were impaneled, and each panel consisted of a foreperson selected by the judge and eleven members randomly selected by lot by the sheriff. The gender and race of the forepersons of those 49 grand juries were identified. And, although the race and gender of the non-foreperson jurors serving on 46 of those 49 grand juries were known, the composition of the first three grand juries was not.⁴ Accordingly, the base number of grand jurors was 526 grand jurors randomly selected from the grand jury venires.⁵ However, the race and gender of 3 of those 526 grand jurors were not initially established, although they were believed to be women based on their first names. Thus, subtracting those three from the total of 526 grand jurors left 523 actual grand jury members and alternates, i.e., those who were randomly selected from the grand jury venires summoned to serve as grand jurors pursuant to Article 413(B).

At the first hearing date, the defendant submitted the race and gender of each of the 523 randomly-selected grand jury members, who actually served as grand jurors or alternates, and the 49 judge-selected grand jury forepersons for the twenty-two-year period. The information was compiled by the defendant through a search of court minutes, voter registration lists, marriage and death certificates, and field interviews. The State stipulated (1) to the authenticity of the records introduced by the defendant and (2) to the fact that the statistical information had been compiled from those records.

Also at the first hearing date, the defendant called Dr. Joel Devine, an expert in the field of quantitative sociology, to explain the results.⁶ Specifically, the witness stated that he had been provided with the race and gender for 523 names out of the total of 526 grand jurors and alternates randomly selected to serve. Although the gender of the three missing persons was probably identifiable based on their first names,⁷ Dr. Devine assumed otherwise, and calculated the data as if the three were white males. Furthermore, because women had been exempted from jury service prior to 1975, Dr. Devine adjusted the figures to omit three additional pre 1975 grand juries.⁸ By doing so, the total number of identifiable, randomly-selected grand jurors, 523, was reduced by 33 to 490.⁹

Dr. Devine's testimony revealed that, of the 490 persons randomly selected as grand jurors from 1975 to 1994, 22.9% were African-American and 52.4% were female. These figures, according to Dr. Devine, were "highly representative" of the voter registration and census figures for Calcasieu Parish. For example, African-Americans constituted 20.3% of the registered voters from December 1988, and according to the 1990 census, African-Americans constituted 22.9% of the entire population in Calcasieu Parish. With respect to women, the census figures from 1970, 1980, and 1990, showed that women comprised between 51% and 51.2% of the population.

Dr. Devine found that these numbers did not correspond to the percentages of African-Americans and women selected since 1975 to serve as grand jury forepersons. Although African-Americans composed 22.9% of the grand jurors randomly selected since 1975, only three of the 43 grand jury forepersons selected by judges after 1975 were African-American, or 7%. With respect to women, who comprised 52.4% of the grand jurors randomly selected since 1975, just 12 of the 43 forepersons selected by judges after 1975 were women, or 27.9%.

Using a standard statistical formula,¹⁰ Dr. Devine computed the probabilities of these small numbers occurring by chance, given the percentages of African-Americans and women in the group of grand jurors randomly selected to serve. According to the witness, the probability of randomly selecting just 3 African-American grand jury forepersons out of 49 was 1 in 392, given that African-Americans made up 21.6% of the pool of grand jurors. For women, the probability of selecting only 12 women grand jury forepersons out of 43 was 1 in 1502, given that women comprised 52.4% of the pool of grand jurors randomly selected to serve between 1975 and 1994.¹¹

After the defense rested, the state called the appointing judge who had selected Mr. Warren Hicks, a white male, as the foreperson for the grand jury that indicted the defendant. When asked if he had any special criteria for selecting Mr. Hicks as foreperson, the judge testified that he chose people with whom he was "personally acquainted, or somehow or other knew." The judge specifically stated that he picked Mr. Hicks because he and the judge were "casually acquainted" and because the judge thought Mr. Hicks was a "good, responsible, stable citizen." On cross-examination, the witness agreed that the majority of the people he knows would be white. After reviewing a list of 85 people who had been called for service on the grand jury that indicted the defendant, the appointing judge recognized the names of only eight people whom he knew or thought he knew, including one white woman, two men who were later identified as African-American, and five white men, one of whom was Mr. Hicks.

Another State witness was Mary Kaye Allemond, executive secretary for the district attorney's office, who...