Macaulay's jury selection ruling tested California's jury strike law

A jury selection ruling Justice Juliet O. Macaulay made as an Orange County trial judge led to a published appellate opinion interpreting California's law against discriminatory jury strikes.

In a 2022 misdemeanor domestic violence trial, the defense sought to strike a white male prospective juror with a law enforcement background. Macaulay granted the prosecution's objection under the law, which first applied to trials that year, noting the juror had said several times he could be fair and impartial. He stayed on the jury.

On appeal, the prosecution conceded that Macaulay had erred because law enforcement personnel are not a protected group under Code of Civil Procedure Section 231.7. But in People v. Guzman (2025), a unanimous panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal, Division 3, where Macaulay now sits, held that the law, aimed at preventing discriminatory exclusion of jurors, requires automatic reversal when an objection to a discriminatory strike is wrongly denied, not when one is wrongly granted. The defendant failed to show prejudice, the panel concluded, noting that the jury acquitted him of the most serious charges.

Macaulay joined the appellate bench in September and seeks a 12-year term in the Nov. 3 election. Cases she has heard involve arbitration under the federal Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021, attorney fees and prescriptive easements. Her first opinions are pending.

In another criminal case, Macaulay denied a self-represented defendant's motion to suppress evidence at a 2022 preliminary hearing. John Guidry, later convicted of burglary and grand theft for using a hammer to break open a Walmart cash register and take $1,755, argued that the Huntington Beach police officer who stopped him lacked reasonable suspicion and had engaged in racial profiling. A unanimous Division 3 panel upheld her ruling in the unpublished People v. Guidry (2024), finding that he matched several details of the suspect's description, was stopped nearby about 10 minutes after the theft and consented to the search. Those multiple identifying details also refuted his racial profiling claim, the panel said.

Macaulay's criminal court assignment lasted until January 2024, when she moved to family law in Orange and Santa Ana. Family law "intersects with almost every other area of the law," she noted in a recent email. Her experience on the trial bench, she said, gave her an appreciation for the nuances of disputes that now informs her appellate work.

"Sometimes, one parent will feel relief while the other feels devastation," she told the Daily Journal in 2024. "But my job is to follow the law. My personal opinion doesn't matter." Family law attorney Steven G. Hittelman said then that she came prepared: "If you are going to engage in hyperbole, you are not going to get very far."

Macaulay counts 22 years in judicial or quasi-judicial roles. She became a deputy commissioner with the state Board of Parole Hearings in 2004, and Gov. Jerry Brown appointed her a commissioner in 2011. She moved in 2012 to the State Hearings Division of the California Department of Social Services, becoming chief administrative law judge and deputy director in 2020. Leading about 140 administrative law judges through the COVID-19 pandemic, she moved hearings online so that none of the division's litigants lost their chance at a hearing, she wrote. Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed her to the Superior Court in 2022.

Born in Nigeria, Macaulay earned her law degree from the University of Ibadan and practiced civil and corporate law before immigrating with her family to the United States through the diversity visa lottery in 1995. After passing the California bar in 1997, she opened a solo practice handling civil, family, immigration and criminal cases.

"I am acutely aware that people come to the Courts to seek assistance because something has gone wrong for them ... and it is critically important that we ensure people are treated with the utmost dignity and respect," she wrote.