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State v. Gomez10/13/2005
subd. 6a(2).
Given the trial court's actions here, there was no opportunity for either party to invoke the formal authority of the court. While a trial court may anticipate a peremptory strike by a party, anticipating one is quite different from initiating one. Here, the trial court sua sponte initiated the peremptory strike, rather than a Batson objection to a party's peremptory strike. This occurred even before the state had an opportunity to examine the venireperson and before any discrimination could possibly have occurred with respect to venireperson 21. Thus, the trial court could not have been intervening to prevent discrimination from occurring. It is important to note that there is no suggestion in this record that counsel for Gomez and the state were unwilling, unable, or unprepared to litigate any Batson issues related to venireperson 21 or that judicial intervention was necessary to protect venireperson 21 or the community from discrimination. In that neither our rules nor case law authorize a trial court to initiate a peremptory strike to exclude a venireperson on behalf of a party, we conclude that the trial court committed serious error. We have said, "Since the judge's duties are of a judicial nature, he should not act as counsel for a party by raising objections which the party should make." Hansen v. St. Paul City Ry. Co., 231 Minn. 354, 360, 43 N.W.2d 260, 264 (1950). "To assume a partisan position 'is to desert the high position to which the judge is elevated, and assume the role of the advocate.'" Id. at 360, 43 N.W.2d at 264 (citation omitted). Therefore, by initiating a peremptory strike and by eliciting the defense's reaction to a possible strike before the state actually exercised the peremptory strike, the court improperly invaded the province of the parties.
It was also improper for the trial court to offer its own reasons justifying the strike before the state articulated its reasons. Doing so is particularly problematic when it occurs before a party has examined or exercised a strike of the venireperson because it interferes with the party's ability to develop, by way of examination, a basis for accepting or striking the venireperson. It also makes it impossible to determine whether the reasons articulated by the party in support of the strike are a mere adoption of the trial court's reasons. Thus, the trial court is deprived of the opportunity to determine the party's real reasons for the strike. See Johnson v. California, ___ U.S. ___, 125 S.Ct. 2410 (2005).
In Johnson, the Supreme Court stated that " he Batson framework is designed to produce actual answers to suspicions and inferences that discrimination may have infected the jury selection process." Id. at 2418 (emphasis added). In that case, the prosecutor used peremptory strikes to remove all three prospective black jurors. Id. at 2414. When the defense objected to the second and third strikes, the trial court did not seek explanation from the prosecutor, but instead gave his own explanation that the strikes could be justified by race-neutral reasons. Id. at 2419. The Court concluded that the disagreement among state-court judges on review of the record of the case "illustrate the imprecision of relying on judicial speculation to resolve plausible claims of discrimination." Id. In this case, because the trial court initiated the peremptory strike and gave its reasons before the state had an opportunity to do so, we are left with judicial speculation, rather than the actions of the parties, to resolve Gomez's claim of discrimination. This does not serve the purpose of eliminating racial bias from our jury system. Therefore, based on the record before us, we conclude that the trial court erred when it
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