Garcia-Dorantes v. Warren, No. 13-2439 (6th Cir. 2015)
Annotate this CaseIn 2001, a jury convicted Garcia-Dorantes of murder in the second degree and assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than the crime of murder. Before his trial started, Garcia-Dorantes failed to raise a Sixth Amendment challenge to the racial composition of the jury venire. In 2002, the Grand Rapids Press published a story about a computer glitch in the Kent County software that had systematically excluded African-Americans from the jury pool from April 2001 through early 2002. As a result of the article, Garcia-Dorantes included a Sixth Amendment fair-cross-section claim in his direct appeal, which the state courts denied as procedurally defaulted due to his failure to object to the composition of the jury venire at trial. Garcia-Dorantes then filed a 28 U.S.C. 2254 habeas petition. The district court found that Garcia-Dorantes had sufficiently demonstrated cause and actual prejudice to excuse his procedural default and had established a prima facie violation of his Sixth Amendment fair-cross-section right. The Sixth Circuit affirmed.
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