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Smith v. State12/22/2000
anteed by the United States Constitution was not violated. See Ross, 487 U.S. at 87-88. This rule would also apply to § 6 of the Alabama Constitution, which gives the defendant the right to a trial `by an impartial jury of the county or district in which the offense was committed.' The plain meaning of this language is that the defendant is entitled only to an impartial jury and that unless the defendant can show that a trial court's erroneous ruling during jury selection prevented the jury from being impartial, there is no violation of § 6."
The appellant, although alleging generally that he was denied his right to an impartial jury, has made no showing that his rights were probably injuriously affected by the trial court's excusing M.M., L.Y., and L.W. After reviewing the record, we conclude that the trial court's error in excusing M.M., L.Y., and L.W. was harmless, and thus not reversible, because, even with the error, the appellant was accorded a trial by an impartial jury.
II.
The appellant contends that the prosecutor's selection of five black veniremembers for individual voir dire was racially motivated, and that it violated his and the veniremembers' statutory and constitutional rights. After extensive voir dire examination of the entire venire by the trial court and the parties, the trial court allowed each party to select certain veniremembers for individual voir dire. The trial court selected three veniremembers for further voir dire, the appellant selected one, and the prosecutor selected five. The five selected by the prosecutor were black. The appellant is black, as were the victims.
We find that the record does not support the appellant's contention. There is nothing in the record to indicate that, or to support a reasonable inference that, the veniremembers selected by the prosecutor for further voir dire were selected for racial reasons. On the contrary, the record shows that the prosecutor had legitimate concerns that justified the additional voir dire of the five potential jurors and that those concerns were not racial. There was no evidence of disparate treatment between black veniremembers and white veniremembers.
The appellant also contends that he was denied his right to a jury chosen from a fair cross-section of the community. He does not now raise on appeal any impropriety in, and he did not object at trial to, the method of selecting jury pools in Houston County. Instead, he argues that the prosecutor's focus on the black veniremembers for individual voir dire and the ultimate removal of some of them for cause resulted in a pool from which to select a jury in which blacks were under-represented. There is no merit in this contention. The appellant failed to meet the burden required to establish a denial of the fair cross-section standard. See Pierce v. State, 576 So. 2d 236, 241-42 (Ala. Crim. App. 1990) (citing Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357 (1979)), which sets out the burden that must be met to establish a denial of the fair cross-section requirement.
III.
The appellant contends that the trial court committed reversible error in overruling his motion made pursuant to Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), in which he claimed that the prosecution exercised two peremptory jury strikes in a racially discriminatory manner. In overruling this motion, the trial court found that the appellant had failed to establish a prima facie case of racial discrimination.
The prosecution has the burden of articulating nondiscriminatory reasons for challenged strikes only after the defendant has met his burden of establishing a prima facie case of discrimination. Batson. And, until that burden is met, th
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