## Facts

- Billy Duren was indicted in Jackson County, Missouri, for first-degree murder and first-degree robbery and was convicted by a jury.
- Missouri law automatically exempted “women who so request” from jury service.
- County practice allowed women to claim exemption on the jury questionnaire and, after summons, to decline service by returning the summons or not reporting.
- Duren moved to quash the jury panel before trial (and again after conviction), arguing the jury-selection system violated the Sixth Amendment requirement that venires reflect a fair cross section of the community.
- Duren showed women were about 54% of the adult population, but were 26.7% of those summoned from the wheel and 14.5% of persons on weekly venires during the relevant period; in the month of his trial, weekly venires averaged 15.5% women.
- Duren’s jury was all male, selected from a panel of 53 persons containing 5 women.

## Issues

1. Whether Missouri’s women-on-request exemption and related opt-out practice, producing substantial and persistent underrepresentation of women on venires, violated the Sixth Amendment fair-cross-section requirement as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.
2. Whether the State carried its burden to justify the resulting underrepresentation by showing it was manifestly and primarily advanced by a significant state interest.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court reversed and remanded.
- The Court held that Missouri’s exemption scheme resulted in systematic underrepresentation of women on venires and violated the Sixth Amendment fair-cross-section requirement.
- The Court found Duren established a prima facie fair-cross-section violation and that Missouri failed to provide a sufficient justification.

## Legal Principles

- To establish a prima facie fair-cross-section violation, a defendant must show: (1) exclusion of a “distinctive” group; (2) the group’s representation on venires is not fair and reasonable relative to its community percentage; and (3) the underrepresentation is due to systematic exclusion in the selection process.
- Women are a “distinctive” group for Sixth Amendment fair-cross-section analysis.
- Persistent, substantial disparity between a group’s community percentage and its venire percentage supports a finding that representation is not fair and reasonable.
- Underrepresentation is “systematic” when it is produced by selection rules or practices that operate generally and predictably over time, rather than by random variation.
- Once a prima facie case is shown, the State must prove the disparity is manifestly and primarily advanced by a significant state interest; categorical exemptions that broadly remove members of a distinctive group without regard to actual burden are insufficient.

## Conclusion

Missouri’s system allowing women to exempt themselves from jury service on request, reinforced by a practice permitting nonappearance as an effective opt-out, predictably produced venires with far fewer women than their share of the community; because the State did not justify this systematic underrepresentation with a significant state interest, the convictions were reversed and the case remanded.


Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357 (1979)