CopyCited 3 times | Published | Supreme Court of Georgia | Oct 21, 2019
...Unsure whether the efforts of the sheriff would prove successful, the
presiding judge also directed the clerk to supplement the number of
prospective grand jurors with persons who had been summoned to
appear for service as petit jurors, a procedure that is authorized by
OCGA §
15-12-66.1.
State, however, has no standing to complain on appeal about a ruling that in
no way aggrieved the State....
...selected to serve on the grand jury. The Clerk of Court
chose [T. S.] and [B. W.] purposefully and not at random .
...
Based on these findings, the trial court granted the motion to
dismiss the indictment, and the State appeals.
2. As we noted earlier, OCGA §
15-12-66.1 authorizes a court
to select persons who have been summoned for service as petit jurors
to supplement the number of persons summoned to appear for
5
service on the grand jury when necessary to secure the attendance
of enough jurors to empanel a grand jury. Section
15-12-66.1
requires, however, that the petit jurors selected to serve on the
grand jury be chosen randomly:
When from challenge or from any other cause there
are not a sufficient number of persons in attendance to
complete the empaneling of grand jurors, the presiding
judge shall order the clerk to choose at random from the
names of persons summoned as trial jurors a sufficient
number of prospective grand jurors necessary to complete
the grand jury. . . .
OCGA §
15-12-66.1 (emphasis added)....
...ry winners, “random”
means “governed by or involving equal chances for each of the actual
or hypothetical members of a population” (punctuation and footnote
omitted)).5 Even if “random” is used only in a more colloquial sense
in OCGA §
15-12-66.1 — that is, even if the statute does not demand
a selection process in which each petit juror has a perfectly equal
chance of being chosen to serve on the grand jury, cf....
...supplement the number of persons summoned for service as grand jurors,
8
trial court was right to conclude that T. S. and B. W. were not
“cho[sen] at random” for service on the grand jury and were not,
therefore, selected as required by OCGA §
15-12-66.1.7
3....
...respect to an irregular grand jury, the remedy for such a violation is
the dismissal of an indictment returned by the grand jury. See
Harper v. State,
283 Ga. 102, 103 (1) (657 SE2d 213) (2008).
Although the State does not dispute that the randomness
requirement of OCGA §
15-12-66.1 is an “essential and substantial”
provision,8 the dissent does, and so, we will consider whether the
randomness requirement is “essential and substantial.” To begin, we
note that the dissent fails to articulate a meaningful s...
...and substantial” standard in this
case.
13
are the “twin pillars” of our modern statutory scheme for the
selection of jurors, but it discounts the significance of the “at
random” requirement of OCGA §
15-12-66.1....
...The essential gist of
the modern scheme is that jury representativeness and impartiality
are best guaranteed by inclusivity in the identification of the
universe of persons eligible to serve and by randomness in selecting
arrays from that universe. It is true that OCGA §
15-12-66.1 does
not concern the selection of grand jurors in the ordinary course; it
applies only when the usual selection process has failed to produce
the appearance of a sufficient number of prospective jurors to
empanel a grand jury....
...at 636 (violation of law
concerning selection of additional jurors when an insufficient
number of summoned jurors have appeared warranted relief).
Moreover, we note that the General Assembly in 2014 specifically
amended the jury selection statutes to add the “at random”
requirement to OCGA §
15-12-66.1, see Ga. L. 2014, p. 862, § 13
14
(amending OCGA §
15-12-66.1 to add “at random”), three years after
its adoption of most of the other provisions of our modern scheme for
selecting juries....
...is
a drastic remedy. Maybe so, but it also is evidence that the General Assembly
knows exactly how to deem a violation irremediable by a motion to quash. The
General Assembly made no such provision with respect to the randomness
requirement of OCGA §
15-12-66.1.
15
its members were randomly selected....
...is not a central component of the overall statutory scheme for
securing fairly representative and non-discriminatory grand juries.
To the contrary, it is a minor adjunct to the statutory scheme to be
used only on an as-needed basis. Thus, while it is true that OCGA §
15-12-66.1 requires the clerk when pulling supplemental grand
jurors to do so “at random” from the randomly generated list of those
already summoned as trial jurors, in my view, this added layer of
randomness is not such an “essential an...
...identity of the persons selected for the array from the universe of
persons eligible to serve.” (Maj. op. at 355.) Such a standard is too
broad, given that one of the basic purposes of the jury selection
13 Although the General Assembly amended OCGA §
15-12-66.1 to add
the “at random” requirement three years after its adoption of most of the other
provisions of our modern scheme for selecting juries, I am loath to speculate as
to the significance of that particular phrase when the General Assembly made
so many other substantial changes to this Code provision....
