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
- 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.
- 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.