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465 Pa. 473

350 A.2d 862

Commonwealth v. Jones

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Decided January 29, 1976

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania · decided 1976-01-29

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“‘[u]se of [voter registration] lists as the sole source of names for jury duty is constitutionally permissible unless this system results in the systematic exclusion of a “cognizable group or class of qualified citizens.” ’ And a group of persons who have failed to register to vote has never been considered to constitute a ‘cognizable group.’”

quoted by 1 later decision, including 262 Pa. Super. 443 - Commonwealth v. Dessus

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1976-01-29

How this case has been cited

Cited by 37 later decisions — most recently December 2002 · most notably Commonwealth v. Abu-Jamal (1998), Commonwealth v. Maxwell (1984)

35 state decisions

1201976198019902000decided

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.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

MANDERINO, Justice

¶1(dissenting).

¶2I dissent. The majority states that, even though blacks register to vote in a proportion smaller than the proportion of blacks in the general population, the defendant was not denied his right to an impartial jury because (1) “a group of persons who have failed to register to vote has never been considered to constitute a ‘cognizable group’ ” and (2) the nonregistration was voluntary in the sense that no one had affirmatively barred their registration. This defies logic! If blacks (and probably other minorities and young people) are less likely to register to vote, then any jury pool that uses voter registration lists as a source of jurors cannot possibly represent a cross section of the community and whether the nonregistration is voluntary or coerced is irrelevant. The end result is still an unrepresentative jury pool. This is particularly true when one considers other *482sources of prospective jurors which are readily available on computers such as social security, census and other lists.

¶3I would hold, that the use of only voter registration lists for selecting prospective jurors is a violation of the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a trial by an impartial jury unless the prosecution can show that in a particular community voter registration lists reflect the general make up of that community.

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