In Smith v. State,[1] the court of appeals held that not all eligible jurors within a venue district are awarded an equal chance of serving as jurors under the Alaska constitution. The superior court judge in the defendant’s trial for alleged crimes that occurred in the predominately Alaska Native rural village of Kiana held proceedings in the urban city of Kotzebue, which is also where the prospective juror pool was derived from. To avoid prohibitively expensive costs, the trial court restricted the applicable pool to the five-mile radius surrounding Kotzebue opposed to the standard 50-mile radius, which restricted the jury pool from including residents of two rural villages comprised nearly of only Alaskan Natives. The defendant raised several issues with the restriction of the applicable jury pool, including: (1) that the jury pool did not adequately represent a cross-section of the community where the crime took place, (2) that Alaskan citizens have a constitutional right to serve on juries and have equal chance to serve on juries, and (3) that he was entitled to an evidentiary hearing to determine the appropriateness of the superior court’s ruling that the jury selection could be restricted to a five-mile radius of Kotzebue to avoid unreasonable costs. The superior court rejected all three of these issues raised by the defendant, which were subsequently appealed following his conviction. The court of appeals held that the defendant failed to provide adequate evidence that a jury pool derived from the residents of Kotzebue would not adequately represent a cross-section of Kiana, where the crime took place. Additionally, the court of appeals upheld the constitutionally of the administrative rule allowing a restricted jury pool to be within a 50-mile radius of where the trial took place. Finally, the court rule that the trial court did err by not providing the defendant an evidentiary hearing to assert that it would not be prohibitively expensive to expand the jury pool to a 50-mile radius of where the trial took place, opposed to the five-mile radius proscribed by the trial court. The court of appeals held that restricting an applicable jury pool to avoid unreasonably prohibitive costs is constitutional.
[1] 440 P.3d 355 (Alaska Ct. App. 2019).
