The State is seeking death sentences against appellant Floyd Wayne Williams in connection with the deaths of two persons. This Court granted appellant’s application for interim review to consider pre-trial whether the list from which appellant’s traverse jury will be selected was composed in an unconstitutional manner. The evidence presented in the trial court showed that the jury commission in Clayton County, pursuant to this Court’s directive in the Unified Appeal Procedure, attempted to balance the percentages of various cognizable groups of persons on the traverse jury source list to match the percentages of those groups of persons reported in the most-recently-available Decennial Census. See U.A.P. II C 6, II E.1 As a result of this attempted forced balancing, there was no significant disparity between the percentage of African-American persons appearing on the traverse jury source list and the percentage of African-American persons in the population of Clayton County as measured by the 2000 Census. However, appellant presented evidence in the trial court suggesting that demographic changes in Clayton County since the 2000 Census have resulted in an increase in the current African-American population of 17.49 percentage points. Appellant argues that, because the source list from which his traverse jury will be selected has been balanced to match the 2000 Census rather than the current demographics of the county, that source list is unconstitutional.
In Ramirez v. State , 276 Ga. 158 575 SE2d 462 2003, this Court considered this same legal question under facts that were slightly less striking. In Ramirez , this Court was confronted by an under-representation of African-American persons on a grand jury source list of 11.9 percentage points. That under-representation had resulted, as in appellant’s case, from demographic changes that had occurred since the last Decennial Census. We considered Ramirez’s claim under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, under the fair cross-section guarantee of the Sixth Amendment, and under OCGA § 15-12-40, and we found no error. We now apply that same pattern of analysis to appellant’s claim, and we again find no error.
