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Jeffries v. State1/29/1997
of promises or threats made during the course of the interrogation. Dr. White also testified that while the appellant was at the hospital he appeared to be lucid and understood instructions.
It is undisputed that on appellate review, "we extend great deference to the fact finding of the suppression hearing with respect to determining the credibilities of contradicting witnesses and to weighing and determining first-level facts." Perkins v. State, 83 Md. App. 341, 346, 574 A.2d 356 (1990). Accordingly, when considering all evidence based on a totality of the circumstances, we find that the appellant's statement was properly admitted as voluntary. See Hof v. State, 337 Md. 581, 595, 655 A.2d 370 (1995).
Batson Challenges
The appellant finally contends that the trial court improperly denied his Batson challenges to the State's exercise of its peremptory strikes. During jury selection, the State informed the court, once twelve individuals had been selected to serve as jurors, that it wished to use twelve of its peremptory challenges to exclude the entire panel. Three of those twelve jurors were African-Americans. Defense counsel observed that only approximately twelve African-Americans were on the entire panel, and by the State exercising its peremptory challenges in the way that it did, the State successfully excluded one-fourth of the African-American panel. Interestingly, the appellant does not tell us what fraction of the non-African-American panel was excluded by the exercise of the other nine peremptory challenges against non-African-Americans. The strikes may have been, with respect to all groups, so randomly proportional that no pattern at all was established so as even to call for the prosecution's explanation of its peremptories.
The trial court, however, implicitly found a pattern of prima facie discrimination and inquired, therefore, into the State's reasons for excluding the three African-American jurors. As to the first juror, the State contended that the juror failed to respond to the court's question about knowledge of the crime; as to the second, the juror apparently had a nephew who felt that he had been falsely accused of a crime, and the State, therefore, felt the juror would be risky; as to the third, the State maintained that the juror did not respond in the affirmative to any question posed by the court during the voir dire process. The appellant contends that the reasons for excluding the three jurors were not race-neutral and that the trial court in fact had difficulty with the reasons espoused by the State.
What matters, however, is Judge Beard's ultimate ruling. He found the prosecutor to be fully creditable in explaining his actual reasons for the three peremptories. The three reasons, accepted at face value, are self-evidently race-neutral. The failure to respond to the court's question about knowledge of the crime is race-neutral. To have a nephew whom one believes was falsely accused of crime is race-neutral. To be non-responsive during the voir dire process is race-neutral. Judge Beard found that the reasons proffered by the State, therefore, were race-neutral.
In reviewing a trial judge's decision of this nature, the Supreme Court has told us that appellate courts must be highly deferential and will not presume to overturn a trial judge's findings on this issue unless they are clearly erroneous. Purkett v. Elem, 514 U.S. , 115 S. Ct. 1769, 131 L. Ed. 2d 834 (1995) (per curiam); Hernandez v. New York, 500 U.S. 352, 111 S. Ct. 1859, 114 L. Ed. 2d 395 (1991).
As this Court has previously observed,
in a practical sense, if, after the party opposing the strike has presented a prima facie
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