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131 Ariz. 400

641 P.2d 888

State v. Rodriguez

Court of Appeals of Arizona

Decided December 23, 1981

Court of Appeals of Arizona · decided 1981-12-23

Relies on State v. Thompson · Wasko v. Frankel · Encinas v. State

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1981-12-23

How this case has been cited

Cited by 24 later decisions — most recently November 2003

24 state decisions

120198119902000decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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HOWARD, Judge,

¶1dissenting.

¶2A defendant is not entitled to be tried by any particular jury, but merely by one which is fair and impartial. State v. Thompson, 68 Ariz. 386, 206 P.2d 1037 (1949). Furthermore, a defendant is not entitled to a perfect trial, but only a fair one. A court should be extremely careful when it creates per se rules, rules the violation of which requires no showing of prejudice. In my opinion, the court went astray in Wasko v. Frankel, 116 Ariz. 288, 569 P.2d 230 (1977) when it ignored prior Arizona precedent and held that a right of a party to a peremptory challenge is a substantial right and forcing a party to use a peremptory challenge to strike a juror whom the trial court should have excused for cause results in reversible error.

¶3In Encinas v. State, 26 Ariz. 24, 221 P. 232 (1923), the court, in a similar situation as we have here, refused to reverse saying that the important thing is that it did not appear that an' objectionable juror was forced upon the defendant. It then held *403that there was no reversible error because even though the defendant had to use five of his peremptory challenges to get rid of jurors who should have been excused for cause, the record disclosed that the twelve jurors who did serve were not disqualified and there was, therefore, no prejudicial error.

¶4When did the law change in Arizona? When Waskowas decided? If so, why didn’t Waskomention Encinasand overrule it? Why go to the law in other jurisdictions, as the court did in Wasko, when we have our own law? Ignoring Encinasdoesn’t make it go away. Cases, such as we have here, should be decided on an ad hoc basis and tested for prejudicial error. To follow Waskois to engage in game-playing since appellant was tried by an impartial jury.

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