Steven Todd Roseboro v. United States

In Duren v. Missouri, this Court described three showings a criminal defendant must make to establish a prima facie violation of the Sixth Amendment’s fair cross-section requirement: “(1) that the group alleged to be excluded is a ‘distinctive’ group in the community; (2) that the representation of this group in venires from which juries are selected is not fair and reasonable in relation to the number of such persons in the community; and (3) that this underrepresentation is due to systematic exclusion of the group in the juryselection process.” 439 U.S. 357, 364 (1979). In the opinion below, the Eleventh Circuit determined that the only relevant consideration for Duren’s second prong was whether Mr. Roseboro could show that the absolute disparity between the percentage of black people among the population eligible for jury service and the percentage of black people in the qualified jury pool was more than ten percent. The question presented is: does the 10% absolute disparity rule serve as the sole metric for examining the second prong of Duren in the context of a fair cross-section argument? Or as an increasing number of Circuit Courts of Appeals have determined, should rigid adherence to the 10% absolute disparity rule be jettisoned in favor of a multi-modal analysis which considers absolute disparity in conjunction with comparative disparity and standard deviation theory?