IN THE DISTRICT COURT OF APPEAL
FIRST DISTRICT, STATE OF FLORIDA
TROY LESSARD, NOT FINAL UNTIL TIME EXPIRES TO
FILE MOTION FOR REHEARING AND
Appellant, DISPOSITION THEREOF IF FILED
v. CASE NO. 1D15-5300
STATE OF FLORIDA,
Appellee.
_____________________________/
Opinion filed December 13, 2017.
An appeal from the Circuit Court for Suwannee County.
David W. Fina, Judge.
Andy Thomas, Public Defender, and Courtenay H. Miller, Assistant Public
Defender, Tallahassee, for Appellant.
Pamela Jo Bondi, Attorney General, and Robert Quentin Humphrey, Assistant
Attorney General, Tallahassee, for Appellee.
PER CURIAM.
AFFIRMED.
ROBERTS and JAY, JJ., CONCUR; MAKAR CONCURS with opinion.
MAKAR, J. concurring.
I concur in affirming Troy Roland Lessard’s convictions on counts of capital
sexual battery and lewd or lascivious molestation, for which he received life
sentences, but write to address his claim—raised for the first time on appeal—that
the decision in Williams v. Florida, 399 U.S. 78 (1970), which upheld Florida’s
use of six-member juries in all non-death penalty criminal cases, was wrongly
decided and should be reconsidered to afford him a retrial before a twelve-member
jury. Florida is the only state that requires six-member juries in life-felony cases,
such as this one, and the empirical studies continue to discredit the Williams
decision, but the relief Lessard seeks is a jurisprudential dark horse.
To begin, it is obvious that Williams, which dismissed the centuries-old
common law practice of twelve-member juries1 as a mere “historical accident”2
1
See, e.g., Barbara Luppi & Francesco Parisi, Jury Size and the Hung-Jury
Paradox, 42 J. Legal Stud. 399 (2013). The authors note that:
The 12-person jury is a timeworn institution; a staple of novels, stage,
and cinema; and well established in the common-law tradition, the
historical tendrils of which extend from the medieval courts of
England. From as far back as the twelfth century, trials were decided
by juries of 12, a number that by the fourteenth century had become
so firmly cemented in the legal tradition that it subsequently acquired
near mystical significance. The 12-person jury later made its way to
the American colonies and persisted after the Revolution as a
constitutional right in the United States.
2
and replaced it with an ad hoc “functional” approach, was based on dubious
anecdotal assertions and demonstrably incorrect statistical and sociological
Id. at 399-400. See also Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466, 477 (2000) (noting
that the “historical foundation” for jury trial principles “extends down centuries
into the common law” such that “trial by jury has been understood to require that
‘the truth of every accusation, whether preferred in the shape of indictment,
information, or appeal, should afterwards be confirmed by the unanimous suffrage
of twelve of [the defendant’s] equals and neighbours....’ 4 W. Blackstone,
Commentaries on the Laws of England 343 (1769)[.]”) (italics in original opinion;
bold emphasis added) (internal citations omitted); see also Blakely v. Washington,
542 U.S. 296, 301 (2004) (noting “that the ‘truth of every accusation’ against a
defendant ‘should afterwards be confirmed by the unanimous suffrage of twelve of
his equals and neighbours[]’” as a “longstanding tenet[] of common-law criminal
jurisprudence”) (citing Blackstone) (emphasis added); see also Baldwin v. New
York, 399 U.S. 117, 122 (1970) (Harlan, J., dissenting) (“With all respect, I
consider that before today it would have been unthinkable to suggest that the Sixth
Amendment’s right to a trial by jury is satisfied by a jury of six, or less, as is left
open by the Court’s opinion in Williams, or by less than a unanimous verdict, a
question also reserved in today’s decision.”). The 1954 screenplay Twelve Angry
Men—much like the oft-repeated Miranda warnings in movies and television
shows—has fixed twelve as having special historic significance in popular culture.
2
Williams, 399 U.S. at 90-91. The Court held in Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S.
145, 148-49 (1968), that the right to jury trial in the Sixth Amendment is a
“fundamental” right that applies to the States via the Due Process Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment. In dissent, Justice Harlan bemoaned that the
“circumvention of history is compounded by the cavalier disregard of numerous
pronouncements of this Court that reflect the understanding of the jury as one of 12
members and have fixed expectations accordingly.” Baldwin, 399 U.S. at 126
(Harlan, J., dissenting).
3
principles that have plagued this body of jurisprudence ever since. 3 Williams held
that a six-member jury in a state court criminal proceeding was functionally the
same and thereby an adequate constitutional proxy for the time-worn traditional
twelve-member jury. 4 But its reasoning foundered on glaring misinterpretations of
social science research and inept methodologies, so much so that one prominent
commentator said that the “quality of social science scholarship displayed [in the
3
See Shawn Kolitch, Constitutional Fact Finding and the Appropriate Use of
Empirical Data in Constitutional Law, 10 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 673, 689 (2006)
(noting that the Supreme Court’s newfound functional approach was flawed
because its “interpretation of the available empirical data was questionable from
the beginning, and illustrates many of the difficulties the Court faces when
attempting to support its holdings with empirical data”); Robert H. Miller, Six of
One Is Not A Dozen of the Other: A Reexamination of Williams v. Florida and the
Size of State Criminal Juries, 146 U. Pa. L. Rev. 621, 622 (1998) (discussing “the
critical ways in which the Court’s misinterpretation and misapplication of social-
science research in Williams and its progeny triggered the
‘unthinkable’ dismantling of an irrevocable constitutional cornerstone”) (footnote
omitted); Baldwin, 399 U.S. at 126 (“The Court’s elaboration of what is required
provides no standard and vexes the meaning of the right to a jury trial in federal
courts, as well as state courts, by uncertainty. Can it be doubted that a unanimous
jury of 12 provides a greater safeguard than a majority vote of six? The uncertainty
that will henceforth plague the meaning of trial by jury is itself a further sufficient
reason for not hoisting the anchor to history.”) (Harlan, J., dissenting).
4
Under the Florida constitution, the “qualifications and the number of jurors, not
fewer than six, shall be fixed by law.” Art. I, § 22, Fla. Const. By statute, Florida
specifies that “[t]welve persons shall constitute a jury to try all capital cases, and
six persons shall constitute a jury to try all other criminal cases.” § 913.10, Fla.
Stat. (2017).
4
Court’s decisions on jury size] would not win a passing grade in a high school
psychology class.”5
Soon thereafter, the Court again rejected historical norms in assessing the
issue of jury unanimity in state court criminal proceedings. Much like its analysis
in Williams, the Court concluded that jury unanimity is not required under the
Sixth Amendment—at least when juries are ten or larger—because it “does not
materially contribute to the exercise of [jurors’] commonsense judgment.”
Apodaca v. Oregon, 406 U.S. 404, 410 (1972). Applying a “functional” approach
again, a plurality “perceive[d] no difference between juries required to act
unanimously and those permitted to convict or acquit by votes of 10 to two or 11 to
one” such that “the interest of the defendant in having the judgment of his peers
interposed between himself and the officers of the State who prosecute and judge
him is equally well served,” whether unanimity is required or not. Id. at 410-11.
The various opinions, concurring and dissenting, reflected no consensus on a
coherent analytical approach. In a companion case, Johnson v. Louisiana, 406 U.S.
356, 364 (1972), the Court addressed a tiered jury system where “less serious
crimes [are] tried by five jurors with unanimous verdicts, more serious crimes [ ]
5
Miller, Six of One Is Not A Dozen of the Other, 146 U. Pa. L. Rev. at 678 (1998)
(quoting Michael J. Saks, Ignorance of Science Is No Excuse, 10 Trial, Nov.-Dec.
1974, at 18).
5
required the assent of nine of 12 jurors, and for the most serious crimes a
unanimous verdict of 12 jurors is stipulated.” In upholding a 9-3 verdict, the Court
concluded that the differential jury system served a rational interest, the state
legislature “obviously intend[ing] to vary the difficulty of proving guilt with the
gravity of the offense and the severity of the punishment.” Id. at 365.
Its jury size/unanimity jurisprudence in a muddle, the Supreme Court tried to
temper the fallout from Williams by invalidating a five-member jury in Ballew v.
Georgia, 435 U.S. 223 (1978), but even greater confusion ensued. Two justices
(Blackmun and Stevens) posited that juries of less than six members substantially
threatened the constitutional guarantee of the jury trial right, notwithstanding the
cost-saving and time-saving arguments that Georgia advanced. Their analysis
reflected that most of the major premises underlying the functional approach in
Williams were inaccurate, but rather than overturn that decision, they side-stepped
it.6 Justice White asserted that the requirement that a jury be a fair cross-section of
6
Justice Blackmun’s opinion found:
• “First, recent empirical data suggest that progressively smaller juries are less
likely to foster effective group deliberation. At some point, this decline leads
to inaccurate fact-finding and incorrect application of the common sense of
the community to the facts. Generally, a positive correlation exists between
group size and the quality of both group performance and group
productivity.”
6
the community would be violated with juries of less than six members. And three
justices (Chief Justice Burger and Justices Powell and Rehnquist) agreed that a
conviction for serious offenses by juries of five members “involves grave questions
of fairness” and that “the line between five- and six- member juries is difficult to
justify, but a line has to be drawn somewhere if the substance of jury trial is to be
preserved.” Id. at 245-46. Finally, three justices (Brennan, Stewart, and Marshall)
concurred only in the holding that “the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments require
juries in criminal trials to contain more than five persons.” Id. at 246. Though
unified in striking down the Georgia law, no coherent framework emerged (again).
And the Court, by acknowledging Williams’s faulty foundation, allowed doubt in
the legitimacy of its functional approach to continue.
• “Second, the data now raise doubts about the accuracy of the results
achieved by smaller and smaller panels. Statistical studies suggest that the
risk of convicting an innocent person (Type I error) rises as the size of the
jury diminishes.”
• “Third, the data suggest that the verdicts of jury deliberation in criminal
cases will vary as juries become smaller, and that the variance amounts to an
imbalance to the detriment of one side, the defense.”
• “Fourth, what has just been said about the presence of minority viewpoint as
juries decrease in size foretells problems not only for jury decisionmaking,
but also for the representation of minority groups in the community.”
• “Fifth, several authors have identified in jury research methodological
problems tending to mask differences in the operation of smaller and larger
juries” such that standard variances in smaller juries were greater.
Ballew, 435 U.S. at 232-39.
7
Indeed, the next year, in Burch v. Louisiana, 441 U.S. 130 (1979), the Court
again noted the less-than-satisfactory nature of its functional approach, this time
considering whether a conviction for a non-petty state offense by a non-unanimous
six-person jury was constitutional. In overturning the conviction, the Court stated:
As in Ballew, we do not pretend the ability to discern a priori a bright
line below which the number of jurors participating in the trial or in
the verdict would not permit the jury to function in the manner
required by our prior cases. But having already departed from the
strictly historical requirements of jury trial, it is inevitable that lines
must be drawn somewhere if the substance of the jury trial right is to
be preserved.
Id. at 137 (internal citations omitted). And thus the ad hoc line-drawing continued,
most often based on the perception of whether judicial efficiencies were at the
expense of a criminal defendant’s right to a fair trial (Louisiana said, for example,
that its smaller, non-unanimous juries shortened deliberation time and reduced the
number of hung juries). As Judge Posner put it, “judicial economy is not a trivial
goal in this era of massive caseloads; and the Supreme Court, in upholding the
constitutionality of the six-person jury in criminal cases, has shown that it is
receptive to innovations designed to reduce the high cost of jury trials.” Smith v.
DeRobertis, 758 F.2d 1151, 1151-52 (7th Cir. 1985) (citing Williams).
In Burch, the balance tipped in the defendant’s favor because when “a State
has reduced the size of its juries to the minimum number of jurors permitted by the
8
Constitution, the additional authorization of nonunanimous verdicts by such juries
sufficiently threatens the constitutional principles that led to the establishment of
the size threshold that any countervailing interest of the State should yield.” 441
U.S. at 139. Another line was thereby drawn.
Despite repeated calls to either abandon its functional approach (and revert
to the historical twelve juror standard)7 or at least update it by bringing it in line
with modern empirical realities (some studies suggest optimal jury sizes based on
multi-variate statistical models), little has changed jurisprudentially in the Supreme
Court since Williams and Ballew. Part of the reason is that “[a]lthough the
Supreme Court has blessed both six-person juries and non-unanimous decision
rules, measured on a national scale, neither decision has had great impact. The vast
majority of states still choose twelve-person, unanimous juries to convict in serious
criminal cases.”8 Forty-five states require twelve unanimous jurors to convict for
7
See, e.g., Randolph N. Jonakait, Originalism As the Defense Attorney’s Friend:
Expanding Sixth Amendment Rights, Champion, May 2009, at 38, 40 (discussing
that principles of originalism create a basis for a constitutional challenge to revert
to the historic standard of a twelve-member jury).
8
Joan L. Larsen, Ancient Juries and Modern Judges: Originalism’s Uneasy
Relationship with the Jury, 71 Ohio St. L.J. 959, 1000-01 (2010) (footnotes
omitted) (noting that “[j]uries, in the American imagination, broadly defined, are
still twelve and decide unanimously. Dollars and cents calculations or more
traditional reliance interests in those states that have gone a different way may still
9
any felony (federal felony trials require twelve jurors); a few states permit six to
eight jurors for specified felonies.9
Florida and Connecticut are the anomalies. 10 As the Second District noted:
“Florida is one of only two remaining states that regularly use six jurors to decide
persuade the Court that its cases should stand, but nothing outside of formal
doctrine—no constitutional expectation—stands as an obstacle to their demise.”).
9
Two professors, who advocate for either a return to the historic jury size of
twelve or a conscientious, updated application of the functional approach, surveyed
state jury size as follows:
Although some states reduced the size of the jury in criminal
prosecutions to six persons (and Georgia attempted to reduce
the size to five) following the Williams decision, most states currently
retain twelve-person juries in felony cases. Only six states
permit juries of fewer than twelve in felony prosecutions, and of those
only four permit six-person juries. Indiana requires twelve-
person juries for class A, B, and C felonies, and six-person juries in all
other felony cases. Massachusetts provides twelve-person juries for all
Superior Court cases and a de novo jury trial for all cases appealed
from a guilty verdict by a six-person jury in district court cases. Thus
no person accused of a felony in Massachusetts must settle for a six-
person jury. Arizona provides twelve-person juries in cases where the
sentence may be more than thirty years and eight-person juries in
other felony cases. In Utah, eight-person juries are permitted in felony
prosecutions.
Alisa Smith & Michael J. Saks, The Case for Overturning Williams v. Florida and
the Six-Person Jury: History, Law, and Empirical Evidence, 60 Fla. L. Rev. 441,
443 (2008) (footnotes omitted).
10
the outcome of criminal cases in which life imprisonment is a mandatory sentence
if the defendant is found guilty of the charged offense.” Gonzalez v. State, 982 So.
2d 77, 78 (Fla. 2d DCA 2008) (footnote omitted) (noting that “[t]he common-law
tradition of twelve jurors for such important criminal cases is overwhelmingly
recognized as the better policy throughout the United States”); see also Alisa Smith
& Michael J. Saks, The Case for Overturning Williams v. Florida and the Six-
Person Jury: History, Law, and Empirical Evidence, 60 Fla. L. Rev. 441, 443
(2008) (“The only other state [besides Florida] with six-person juries in felony
cases is Connecticut. All other state and federal felony prosecutions require
twelve-person juries. The states that have the death penalty, including Florida,
require twelve-person juries in all capital or death cases.”).
Connecticut, though requiring six-member juries, provides that no person
accused of an offense punishable by “life imprisonment without the possibility of
release or life imprisonment, shall be tried by a jury of less than twelve without
such person’s consent.” Conn. Gen. Stat. Ann. § 54-82 (2017) (amended in 2012).
That leaves Florida with the distinction of being the only state that requires six-
10
Id. (The only other state with six-person juries in felony cases is Connecticut. All
other state and federal felony prosecutions require twelve-person juries. The states
that have the death penalty, including Florida, require twelve-person juries in all
capital or death cases.).
11
member juries for non-capital crimes punishable by life imprisonment, which is the
sentence that Lessard received on the capital sexual battery count (life in prison
without parole) and the lewd and lascivious molestation of a minor count (life in
prison with a minimum mandatory of twenty-five years).
Though Florida is alone in using six-member juries for life felonies,
Lessard’s demand for a twelve-member jury for the serious charges against him is
a non-starter. No federal constitutional impediment stands in the way of a six-
person jury in a state criminal court. And our state supreme court, as well as the
district courts, have uniformly rejected a claimed constitutional right to a twelve-
member jury in similar situations; certain capital offenses, for which only a life
sentence is now permissible rather than death, require only a six-member jury.
State v. Hogan, 451 So. 2d 844, 845-46 (Fla. 1984) (“Sexual battery of a child,
therefore, while still defined as a ‘capital’ crime by the legislature, is not capital in
the sense that a defendant might be put to death” such that “a twelve-person jury is
not required when a person is tried under that statute.”).11
11
Lessard asserts that the Florida Supreme Court in Hogan violated separation of
powers principles by negating the statutory twelve-member jury requirement in
capital cases, urging that the Court “as presently constituted” ought to revisit the
issue. As to the capital sexual battery count, he argues:
12
As Judge Altenbernd’s scholarly opinion noted almost a decade ago, an
argument in favor of twelve-member juries for felonies involving mandatory life
sentences without parole “is worthy of consideration, but this court has no
authority to overrule the precedent from the United States Supreme Court that
endorsed the use of a jury with only six members as constitutional, nor
the Florida law that authorizes and perhaps compels the use of six-
member juries in non-capital criminal cases.” Gonzalez, 982 So. 2d at 78. Instead,
jury size is now principally a legislative branch question, one that Florida’s
In light of special rules of evidence authorizing admission of hearsay
and collateral-crime evidence in molestation cases, precedent
excusing such cases from requirements that the date of offense be
alleged with specificity, and society’s revulsion at child molestation,
the Legislature may have wished to maintain a protective
counterweight in the form of a twelve-person jury in prosecutions for
molestation compelling a life sentence.
Lessard asks that we certify a question (“Should the court recede from its holding
in State v. Hogan, 451 So. 2d 844 (Fla. 1984), that Florida law does not compel a
twelve-person in a trial for ‘capital’ sexual battery?”), but a similar question was
certified by this Court in 2003 and rejected, see Hall v. State, 853 So. 2d 546, 549
(Fla. 1st DCA 2003) (“Whether a 12–person jury is required in a first degree
murder case where the death penalty may not be imposed as a matter of law.”), rev.
denied, 865 So. 2d 480 (Fla. 2003), making certification now less compelling.
Lessard points to the recent empirical work on jury size as a basis for certification,
but the Florida Supreme Court would be in no better position to evaluate those
studies or do its own empirical work than would the Florida Legislature, which has
been considering jury size as to life felonies in recent years. Whether the U.S.
Supreme Court might delve into such empirical matters is a different question.
13
legislature continues to debate. 12 Beyond that, the future of jury size jurisprudence
lies in the United States Supreme Court, which could update its functional
approach based on contemporary social science research, abandon Williams and
return to the originalist position of twelve-member juries, or—like it has done for
four decades—leave it be.13
12
See, e.g., 2017 Florida Senate Bill No. 962, (proposing change to section 913.10,
Florida Statutes, to say: “Number of jurors.-Twelve persons shall constitute a jury
to try all capital and life felony cases, and six persons shall constitute a jury to try
all other criminal cases.”). Since 2014, at least one bill has been proposed to make
this type of change to the statute.
13
The Court has turned down petitions in 13-1179, Irving v. Florida; 08-6833,
Gonzalez v. Florida; and 08-6868, Deltoro v. Florida.
14