United States v. Brian E. Turner

The issue on appeal is whether the district court impermissibly restricted this criminal defendant’s exercise of peremptory challenges by treating defense counsel’s acceptance of a jury panel as then constituted as a waiver of a peremptory challenge. The effect of the district court’s restriction in this case was to deprive the defendant, Turner, of all of his peremptory challenges.

Turner was convicted for a series of offenses growing out of a serious assault on a fellow federal prisoner. He contends that the district court committed reversible error when it refused to permit him to exercise a peremptory challenge of a new juror, who took the place of a juror excused by a codefendant, on the ground that each time that he had accepted a panel constituted the exercise of a peremptory challenge, thereby exhausting his challenges before he actually challenged any juror.

Turner was tried with two codefendants, Bennett and Johnson. The trio agreed, through their counsel, that the ten peremptory challenges to which they were entitled under Fed.Rules Crim.Proc. rule 24(b) would be allocated to three apiece with the final challenge to be exercised jointly. During voir dire, the…