C People of Michigan v. Curtis Lee Richardson III ( 2023 )

If this opinion indicates that it is “FOR PUBLICATION,” it is subject to
revision until final publication in the Michigan Appeals Reports.
STATE OF MICHIGAN
COURT OF APPEALS
PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF MICHIGAN, UNPUBLISHED
December 21, 2023
Plaintiff-Appellee,
v No. 360600
Saginaw Circuit Court
CURTIS LEE RICHARDSON III, LC No. 17-043882-FC
Defendant-Appellant.
Before: GLEICHER, C.J., and JANSEN and RICK, JJ.
GLEICHER, C.J. (concurring).
I fully concur with the majority opinion. I write separately to respectfully respond to the
dissent, and to suggest that our Supreme Court consider adopting a Court Rule that would assist
trial judges weighing Batson objections.
The dissent inaccurately characterizes the majority opinion as having concluded that the
dismissal of juror DC was pretextual “because the prosecutor did not ask that juror any questions.”
The prosecutor’s failure to make any inquiries of DC was merely one piece of evidence supporting
pretext. As the majority pointed out, the trial court’s decision to overrule Richardson’s Batson
objection was devoid of any factual analysis. Instead, the trial court essentially agreed with the
assessment of an interested and unsworn courtroom witness that DC may have been “dozing.” The
dissent correctly recites the general rule that a trial court’s credibility assessments are not subject
to challenge on appeal. But here the trial court made no credibility judgement; it dodged the issue
by accepting that a prosecution witness was credible. That might be good enough if the prosecutor
himself (or anyone else) had actually seen the alleged dozing. But that is not what the record
reflects.
An appellate court’s review of a trial court’s Batson’s ruling is complicated not only by the
need to review a cold record, but also by the inherent difficulty in applying the three-step
framework when implicit rather than explicit bias may have motivated a strike. Justice David
Breyer presciently observed in Miller-El v Dretke, 545 US 231, 267–68; 125 S Ct 2317; 162 L Ed
2d 196 (2005) (BREYER, J., concurring) that “at step three, Batson asks judges to engage in the
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awkward, sometime hopeless, task of second-guessing a prosecutor’s instinctive judgment—the
underlying basis for which may be invisible even to the prosecutor exercising the challenge.” The
academic literature cited by Justice Breyer in Miller-El makes a powerful case that “despite
Batson, the discriminatory use of peremptory challenges remains a problem.” Id. at 268.
At least one state has responded to the challenge of “protecting litigants’ rights to equal
protection of the laws and jurors’ rights to participate in jury service free from racial
discrimination” by adopting a Court Rule creating a new step three inquiry. See State v Jefferson,
192 Wash 2d 225, 229-230; 429 P3d 467 (2018) and State v Vandyke, 318 Or App 235, 239 n 1;
507 P3d 339 (2022) (AOYAGI, J., concurring). See also Wash General R 37.1 In my view, our
Supreme Court should consider an amendment to the Court Rules that more effectively addresses
potential bias in the jury selection process.
/s/ Elizabeth L. Gleicher
1
This rule can be accessed online at the following link:
<https://www.courts.wa.gov/court_rules/pdf/GR/GA_GR_37_00_00.pdf>.
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