Dallas Court of Appeals, No. 05-18-00665-CV (August 18, 2020)
Justices Pederson III, Reichek (Opinion linked here), and Carlyle
Dissents from Denial of En Banc Reconsideration by Justices Evans (Dissent linked here) and Schenck (Dissent linked here)
A big rig hauling an oversized “boom lift” for United Rentals struck a bridge in a highway construction zone, which caused a bridge beam to collapse on a pickup truck, killing the driver. The decedent’s mother and son brought a wrongful-death and survival suit against several defendants. Before judgment, all defendants except United Rentals settled or were dismissed. During voir dire, the court granted two of Plaintiffs’ Batson challenges to United Rentals’ use of preemptory strikes, and denied United Rentals’ competing Batson challenges. The jury found for Plaintiffs and the court entered judgment awarding $2.79 million in damages. United Rentals appealed.
Before addressing the Batson issues, the appeals court overruled United Rentals’ substantive issues, including its arguments that the negligence verdict was error because United Rentals, “as a shipper, had no duty to see that the carrier … shipped its cargo safely,” and there was insufficient evidence to support the damages awarded for the decedent’s “conscious pain and mental anguish” in the few seconds between the collision and his death. Those holdings consume over 35 pages of the panel’s opinion, and Justice Schenck’s dissent to the denial of en banc review urges the Texas Supreme Court “to establish the proper review standard to govern pain and suffering awards.” These issues could be the subject of a separate blog post.
Turning to the Batson dispute, the Court summarized United Rentals’ argument: The “trial court erred in granting appellees’ challenges to two of United Rentals’ peremptory strikes of black women while denying United Rentals’ challenges to appellees’ use of strikes on men, four of whom were white.”
The Batson rules were originally promulgated to prevent criminal prosecutors from using peremptory strikes to exclude jurors solely because they were of the same race as the defendant. See Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79, 89 (1986). Batson has since been extended to civil trials and to other “suspect” grounds for striking potential jurors. See Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co., 500 U.S. 614, 618-28 (1991); Goode v. Shoukfeh, 943 S.W.2d 441, 444-45 (Tex. 1997).
Applying Batson involves a three-step process similar to the test for employment discrimination. First, the party objecting to a preemptory strike must establish a prima facie case it “was used to exclude a venire member on the basis of race or gender.” Second, the proponent of the strike must articulate “a race- or gender-neutral reason for the strike.” Finally, the party challenging the strike has an opportunity to rebut the explanation and show it is a pretext for unlawful discrimination. The standard for evaluating a strike under Batson is “whether race [or gender] was a motivating factor in counsel’s exercise of the strike.” The trial court’s rulings, often based on credibility assessments, are subject to review for abuse of discretion.
Here, Plaintiffs objected to United Rentals’ use of all five of its peremptory strikes on black women, and United Rentals objected to Plaintiffs’ striking four white men and one Hispanic man. The judge granted two of Plaintiffs’ Batson challenges, and denied all of United Rentals’ challenges. After reviewing the voir dire colloquies and arguments of counsel, the Court of Appeals held the judge did not abuse her discretion in finding that race was a motivating factor for United Rentals striking one of the two jurors. Central to the Court’s holding was that the record did not support counsel’s stated reason for striking the prospective juror. The second juror placed on the jury over United Rentals’ objection did not join in the jury’s adverse verdict, so the appeals court held any error in allowing her to serve was harmless.
As for the trial court’s denial of United Rentals’ challenge to Plaintiffs’ strikes, the appeals court rejected the argument that Plaintiffs’ counsel admitted unlawful discrimination by telling the judge, “We know from our focus groups that the African-American female is the most favorable juror for this case for whatever reason.” The court concluded counsel made this statement in the context of “explaining why they believed United Rentals’ strike of [a] particular black panelist was pretextual,” and did not evidence Plaintiffs’ “intent to seat a jury without whites or males.” And although the Court acknowledged the gender and racial “disparities suggest something more than happenstance,” they did not alone “establish that appellees’ explanations of the strikes were pretextual.” The Court then conducted a “comparative analysis” of the record relevant to each of Plaintiffs’ strikes and concluded the judge did not abuse her discretion in denying the challenges. The Court explained, “Disparate treatment is not shown where a party strikes a juror because of multiple characteristics and does not strike jurors of other races or genders who share one or more of those characteristics.”
The online docket does not reveal a request for en banc review or a vote on such a request. Nevertheless, two dissents from a denial of en banc consideration, released at the same time as the panel opinion, indicate a vote did occur. See Tex. R. App. P. 41.2(c). Justice Evans, joined by Justices Whitehill and Schenck, submitted a lengthy opinion supporting reversal and remand for a new trial on the grounds that “a race- and gender-based goal—the substantial motivation—in selecting the jury was plainly and openly stated, and 100% of the peremptory challenges were perfectly consistent with that goal.” The dissent characterized the statement of Plaintiffs’ counsel that “the African-American female is the most favorable juror for this case” as rare “direct evidence of discriminatory intent,” which, combined with evidence of the plan’s execution, “may well stand for itself and obviate any need of further analysis.” Nevertheless, the dissent reviewed in detail the record relevant to each of the jurors excluded by Plaintiffs. In addition to Plaintiffs’ stated “discriminatory goal,” the dissent found “misstatements of the record” and “pretextual reasons about which [Plaintiffs] did not ask questions.” According to the dissent, “the only possible conclusion” is that Plaintiffs “intended to strike non-black men from the jury in violation of Batson” and its progeny.
