United States v. Evans, No. 18-2044 (7th Cir. 2019)
Annotate this CasePolice arrested five men involved in a string of Milwaukee armed robberies in 2016. Three of the defendants cooperated with the government and pled guilty. The two remaining defendants, Hunter and Evans, were convicted. The Seventh Circuit affirmed, upholding the district court’s handling of jury selection and denial of their Batson challenge. Even if the court could have conducted a more perfect jury selection by starting over with a new panel, the choice to restart the process with the same panel was not clear error. The Supreme Court has expressly declined to mandate a procedural approach for handling jury selection after a party raises a Batson challenge. The court rejected an argument that the district court violated the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause when it prevented them from cross‐examining government witnesses about the specific prison terms they avoided through their cooperation. The defense’s cross‐examination exposed enough information for the jury to deduce that the witnesses received a serious benefit from cooperating with the government. The court also rejected challenges to how the trial court handled witness testimony and to the sufficiency of the evidence.
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