You can learn about juries from careful reading of case law and scholarly sources. But the newspaper has jury lessons too.
The defendant punched a juror. Really.
Last week I wrote about U.S. v. Simtob, where a juror complained that the defendant was "eyeballing" him (or her). The Ninth Circuit sent the case back because the judge hadn't asked the jurors whether the incident would affect their views. In the post, I wondered whether this rule might not allow enterprising defendants to taint their own juries by behaving badly.
I'm taking the position that defendant Richard Glawson did not read my post before he punched a juror -- an elderly, male juror -- in front of all the other jurors in Boston last week. (The juror wasn't hurt.) The trial judge denied a mistrial. "[The judge] dismissed the juror who was hit," says the AP story, "but says Glawson should not be allowed to benefit from his own disruptive behavior." Glawson will be shackled for the rest of the trial.
The judge followed his instincts, but not necessarily the law, at least not if Massachusetts should happen to follow the Simtob case. It seems unlikely that the un-punched jurors are as open-minded about Glawson's case as they were before they watched him hit their colleague. The news story doesn't say whether the judge interviewed the other jurors, or even the one who took the punch. So I'm setting up my Westlaw search to watch what happens to this one.
Judicial instinct vs. the quiet objection
I was already thinking about judges' instinctive responses to juror bias issues because of People v. Dukes, decided by New York's highest court on May 1. The trial judge there faced a common situation: a juror didn't realize she knew the complaining witness until the witness took the stand.
It wasn't just that she knew him. The juror told the judge not only that she might have worked with the defendant, but that "although she was unsure, she had some recollection that he was fired for an incident involving a gun." She insisted she could be fair and wouldn't tell the others, but the judge dismissed the juror, as many judges would have done. In fact, both counsel often agree to dismiss a juror who knows a witness, especially if the juror knows a memorable fact like that.
But here, defense counsel objected -- quietly, as I imagine the scene, although maybe not. Either way, the objection should have kicked the trial court out of habitual response mode and into error prevention mode, but it didn't, and the high court reversed. You can only dismiss a juror in New York "when it becomes obvious that [she] possesses a state of mind which would prevent the rendering of an impartial verdict," the court said, and the trial judge didn't make that finding.
_____________
Update: The judge in the Glawson case granted the mistrial after all.
(Photo by Bryan Furnace at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bfurnace/226693116/; license details there.)
