Prosecutors Laud Ruling on Jury Makeup

Prosecutors in North County on Monday were heralding a state Supreme Court ruling that criminal defendants can get fair trials in the Superior Court at Vista even though juries there do not mirror the racial composition of San Diego County as a whole.

In a decision handed down late Friday, the justices rejected a potentially far-reaching legal challenge to the Vista court’s practice of selecting jurors only from North County rather than countywide.

Officials in the San Diego County district attorney’s office expressed relief after the ruling. If the Supreme Court had declared the selection process for Vista juries unconstitutional, they said, it could have prohibited the North County court from handling felony trials or required that jurors be drawn from throughout the county.

“It was potentially devastating,” said Philip Walden, supervising deputy district attorney in Vista. “We would have been out of business in terms of felonies.”

Defense attorneys, meanwhile, voiced dismay over the ruling, saying the Supreme Court decision would make it more difficult to get a fair trial for many defendants, especially racial minorities.

“I was disappointed,” said Robert Gusky, the Poway defense attorney who brought the issue before the high court. “I feel that the obligation to give a defendant a fair trial far outweighs any inconvenience to witnesses and to jurors who may have to travel a bit farther.”

Aside from the constitutional implications of the case, prosecutors say the Supreme Court ruling should pave the way for the start of the Troiani murder-for-hire trial. The case, in which Laura Troiani is charged with hiring five Marines to slay her Marine sergeant husband, has been delayed for more than two years, in part because of concerns by defense attorneys about the demographic makeup of North County juries.

When the Vista court was founded in 1970, juries were selected from the pool of eligible voters in the 5th Supervisorial District. After several legal challenges to the selection process, the jury pool was enlarged in 1985 to include the area encompassed by the larger North County Judicial District.

But that wasn’t good enough for Gusky, who pushed the jury selection issue a step farther--to the Supreme Court. Gusky maintained that his client, Eddie O’Hare of Rainbow, would be denied a fair trial in Vista Superior Court because there would probably be fewer blacks on the jury than if the defendant were tried in downtown San Diego. O’Hare is white.

While the jury selection issue went forward, O’Hare’s fate was sealed. Eager to avoid a legal showdown, court officials transferred his case to San Diego, and O’Hare was convicted of kidnaping, assault and child-beating. He is now serving a 15-year term in state prison.

Undeterred, Gusky pushed ahead with the jury selection challenge.

Gusky and other defense attorneys have argued that since Vista’s courts are a branch of the San Diego Superior Court system, North County juries should reflect the racial makeup of the entire county. Juries in Vista, however, are drawn only from North County. Federal census figures, they said, indicate that blacks comprise only 1.5% of the North County population, compared to 4.5% countywide.

In recent years, some Vista judges began transferring cases to San Diego at the request of the defendants. The district attorney’s office argued against moving such cases downtown, saying that North County jurors were the proper ones to judge innocence or guilt in crimes committed in North County. Moreover, prosecutors maintained that it was unfair to send victims, witnesses and law enforcement officers to distant San Diego for trials.

As defense attorneys saw it, the only solution was to draw Vista jurors from the countywide juror pool, even if it meant ordering residents of far-flung communities in East or South County to trek to Vista for the sake of a racially balanced jury.

But the state Supreme Court disagreed. In a 4-3 decision, the justices reaffirmed a ruling by the 4th District Court of Appeal, which last March found the Vista jury selection process to be constitutional.

Voting in the majority were Justices Joseph Grodin, Stanley Mosk, Edward Panelli and Malcolm Lucas. Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird and Justices Cruz Reynoso and Allen Broussard dissented.

The Supreme Court majority agreed with the appeal court that there “is no constitutional impediment” to declaring the North County Judicial District as a representative community from which to draw jurors.

While the Sixth Amendment provision regarding a jury of peers guarantees that no member of a local community would be arbitrarily or unnecessarily excluded from a jury, the majority noted that Gusky had not claimed there was any such exclusion from within North County’s ranks.

Adopting the language of the appellate court ruling as their opinion, the majority declared that the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial does not limit government’s ability to define the community from which jurors are selected.

Whenever an offense is committed, they wrote, “it will nearly always be possible, simply by enlarging the area from which the (jury) is drawn, to obtain different mixes of social/ethnic viewpoints and economic classes on a jury panel. However, it is practically necessary to limit the area of draw in some arbitrary manner, even though such limitation obviously restricts or alters jury composition.”

Broussard, in the dissenting opinion, argued that branch courts such as the one in Vista “do not constitute autonomous judicial districts, but function as units of a countywide system.” Moreover, he maintained that “the relevant community” from which the Vista jury pool should be selected is the entire county.

“I am troubled by the majority’s casual treatment of a fundamental constitutional right,” Broussard wrote, stressing that “it is constitutionally intolerable to abridge a defendant’s right to trial by his peers based on an arbitrary, nonrepresentative, bureaucratic choice resting on undisclosed and possibly indefensible considerations.”

Broussard also argued that “given the far-reaching implications for jury composition,” the pool of prospective jurors should be drawn up by the state Legislature, not by a court administrator “presumably for reasons of administrative convenience.”

On Monday, prosecutors said the verdict had implications not only for San Diego County, but also for counties throughout the state. Many larger counties in California have branch courts, which draw juries from a select region in order to ease travel burdens and other logistical headaches.

“It would have been devastating if we hadn’t won,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Paul Morley, who argued the issue before the Supreme Court. “It would have meant very few criminal cases would be tried in North County. Even worse would have been the statewide impact.”

Moreover, Morley insisted that North County is “very balanced” in terms of demographic factors.

“We’re not talking about bringing the area served down to such a small size that there’s no balance,” he said.

But Gusky said he felt that would be just the result.

“I think we’re going to continue to get juries with zero or one black,” Gusky said. “That could be a major influence on how they interpret the facts.”