 |
 |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|
|
|
|
Lovell v. State11/12/1997
ch the mitigating factor begins possible operation. Further, the absence of any response by the court to the jury's relevant inquiry created a real risk that the factors bearing on life experience and maturity, which are part of the concept of youthful age, were not considered at all. For these reasons the trial court abused its discretion by not responding to the jury's request for a supplemental instruction.
The error is not harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, as required by Dorsey v. State, 276 Md. 638, 350 A.2d 665 (1976). One or more jurors were sufficiently concerned over the possible application of the youthful age mitigating factor to a murderer, who was twenty-four years old at the time of the crime, that they sought clarification. Lovell had only a tenth grade education, had no military service, had no work history, was unmarried, and, since age seventeen, had spent the better portion of his life incarcerated. If only one juror was not persuaded that youthful age, coupled with the absence of any conviction for a crime of violence, were outweighed by the aggravating circumstances, the jury could not impose a death sentence.
V
In view of our holdings in Parts II and IV hereof, it is unnecessary to address Lovell's contentions of error in excusing certain jurors for cause.
VI
Lovell also challenged the array by moving that the proceedings against him be stayed until the system for selecting potential jurors in Talbot County conformed to constitutional and statutory requirements. He asserted, inter alia, a violation of his Sixth Amendment right to "a jury drawn from a fair cross section of the community," Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 527, 95 S. Ct. 692, 696, 42 L. Ed. 2d 690, 696 (1975), based on an allegedly unfair and systematic underrepresentation of African Americans in Talbot County jury pools. If Lovell's challenge to the Talbot County jury selection plan was well-founded and he was entitled to a stay, that conclusion would impact jury selection for his resentencing. Consequently, this issue is not moot.
Persons to be summoned for jury duty in Talbot County are identified exclusively from the list of registered voters in the county. Through his expert on statistics, Lovell produced evidence based on 1990 census data that 17.6% of the population of Talbot County between the ages of eighteen and sixty-nine are African Americans. The expert had also caused jury qualification questionnaires to be examined for the circuit court's second term of 1994, both terms of 1995, and the first term of 1996. Based primarily on a sample consisting of one-third of those questionnaires, the expert concluded that African Americans constituted 8.3% of the circuit court's arrays over the period studied. In the expert's opinion, these disparities constituted a substantial and statistically significant underrepresentation of African Americans. Lovell's expert further testified that drawing potential jurors from lists compiled from both the voter registration records and records of licensed motor vehicle operators resident in Talbot County would reduce the disparity by more than one-half.
The expert, and the fair cross-section cases, use the term "absolute disparity." It is the difference in percentage points between the ideal representation of a group in the jury pools, utilizing that group's percentage of the total population, and the actual representation of that group in the jury pools, expressed as a percentage. In the instant matter the expert subtracted from the ideal of 17.6% African Americans in the total population, the 8.3% representation in the jury pools to derive an absolute disparity of 9.3 percentage points. The exper
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 Maryland Personal Injury Attorneys
Personal Injury Lawyers
|
| |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|