Jury Pool Study Could Put Courts in Hot Water
The criminal case against the combative and controversial lawyer Geoffrey Fieger on campaign finance charges ended in acquittal last year in federal court in Detroit. But the loss his legal defense team handed federal prosecutors might continue paying those negative dividends to the point of payback.
A lawyer in Fieger’s firm today filed a federal habeas petition (PDF) on behalf of a former Detroit city councilman, claiming that blacks are so underrepresented in pools for both petit and grand juries that his indictment and trial were unconstitutional. That’s an argument that’s being made increasingly in federal courts around the country.
The habeas petition for Alonzo Bates says Wayne County, which includes Detroit, should account for 39 percent of the jury pool, but instead is “markedly and substantially underrepresented” with only 28 percent. Further, it says that Wayne County is 41.8 percent African-American; African Americans comprise 22 percent of the nine counties; and they make up only 9 percent of the jury wheel for both petit and grand juries.
The master jury wheel, the petition says, “systematically excludes African Americans from serving on federal juries in Detroit.”
Fieger had made the same claim in his own criminal case, based only on the 250-person pool, or venire, for the jury, of whom only 187 showed up. His legal team was just beginning to look at two years worth of data from more than 26,000 jury questionnaires when Fieger’s own jury came back with a not-guilty verdict.
No need for appeal made the matter moot. But the project continued and all the numbers were crunched (PDF).
“We felt strongly that we should continue investigating this because we’re in court all the time,” says Michael Dezsi, who is in Fieger’s firm and filed the petition on behalf of Bates. “This affects everybody.
“And since we filed that motion in Geoff Fieger’s case, I’ve been barraged by letters from federal prisoners convicted in Detroit,” says Dezsi.
Bates is serving a 33-month sentence for his conviction on various charges concerning “ghost” employees on his payroll while he was a city councilman.
The habeas petition also claims ineffective assistance of counsel in Bates trial in 2006. The lawyer argued the government had failed to turn over information about possibly exculpatory statements from a potential witness, but the judge ruled the defense lawyer should have turned that information up in his own efforts.
See Also:
ABA Journal: “Motormouth”
