I work for a criminal defense firm, and we’re in the middle of a five-week trial right now. Today, we’ve had to take two breaks to deal with one particular juror who, it would seem, showed up hung over this morning. He’s a young guy who apparently had to spend a lot of time (over ten minutes on two different occasions) in the bathroom. Earlier in the morning, he was admonished for falling asleep during trial yesterday. Other jurors have reported that the guy has been texting during trial and even surreptitiously answered his phone during witness examinations at one point. :rolleyes: I think the guy is angling to get kicked because he’s bored, but who knows?
In the last trial I was a part of, which was a four-month ordeal, one of our jurors actually died, sadly. That was hard to take because he seemed to be a really nice, jovial guy, and I’m sure it was especially difficult for the other jurors who, at that point, had basically spent every day with the guy for two months.
So, I don’t know if there are enough lawyers and folks who have served on juries to make this thread as interesting as I’d like it to be, but if you have any stories about strange or unusual happenings with jurors, I’d love to hear about it!
There was a case in Oz recently of jurors taking copious notes during trial - admirable diligence until it was discovered that they were all sudoku fiends and not paying a blind bit of notice to the court.Story here The case was aborted, at a cost of 1 million $, and the time of 105 witnesses! It’s now known as the ‘Sudoku mistrial’.
THere have been similar stories in the UK. They’re actually very serious, as there is no mechanism for dealing with it AFAIK and the case gets rules a mistrial. Is there not some setup in the US that involves alterate jurors, so if one goes down it doesn’t derail the entire process?
Yes, we have alternates here in the states. The number of alternates assigned usually depends on the length of the trial. In our current case, there are five alternates. I believe we had seven during the four-month trial. But if you have more jurors kicked off or disqualified than you have alternates to replace them…what other recourse would there be? In the case listed in your article, there were apparently five jurors who had to be dismissed, which is an awful lot.
I was once on trial, and one of my male jurors stood out because he was dressed in a tracksuit. After they had been in to deliberate my case, the guy in the tracksuit came and sat in the seat furthest away from the judge. As he was sitting down, I noticed him make a gesture with his hand, indicating the number 2, and when I looked in the direction he had made the signal, I saw the detective who had dealt with my case, who turned away a little sheepishly, as I no doubt glared at him.
It then came as no surprise to me when the judge read out my sentence, and I had been convicted on count 2 of the offense I had been tried with. This prompted me to wonder how easy it would be for the police to wangle into a jury, someone they knew forceful enough to sway the rest of the jury, somewhat like Twelve Angry Men?
I could understand them using this tactic to ensure a dangerous felon got their deserved sentence, but I was not in that category, and I eventually put my experience down to paranoia.
Under the theory that any reversal for juror misconduct counts as “strange…”
…I had a case once where the accused spoke only Spanish, and required an interpreter. My guy was convicted, but about a week later I got a call from one of the jurors, who said that during deliberations another juror who also apparently spoke Spanish had told them all “what the witness was REALLY saying.” The trial judge had a hearing and then tossed the conviction, and I ended up dodging a retrial because my guy was sufficiently cowed that he took the Commonwealth’s deal to avoid a retrial.
Keeping in mind that I am in no way disputing your story - did you know there’s a Law and Order episode where this exact thing happens? Was it based on your case?!!? Or is this kind of thing somewhat common?
[Guess] The interpreter would’ve been court approved/appointed, and it would be assumed the juror was full of shit.
I don’t have any weird juror stories but the weirdest thing I saw while serving on a jury was a guy who was representing himself questioning himself on the stand. The judge made him do it and he really went with it, kind of hooking his head around one way while asking the question and looking straight ahead while answering. Every one of us in the jury box was suppressing laughter and we all cracked up when we got back to our room.
Strange happenings: the defendant, on trial for the murders of his wife and kids, with a long parade of women testifying that he’d coerced them into having affairs, decided that the courtroom was perhaps the best place to begin openly flirting with two women on the jury. We sent a complaint through the bailiff to the public defender who sat with him (which itself seemed odd-- he had a high-cost private lawyer, yet there was a public defender sitting there for the heck of it… is that normal?).
One juror almost got booted when, on Valentine’s Day, her husband sent a little singing/dancing gorilla toy, the kind you see at Walgreen’s, that happened to be wearing a striped shirt. The sheriffs who guarded us at our hotel felt that it might have been a “message” to the juror, and she was called in to be grilled by the judge. Another juror snuck alcohol into her hotel room, and was hung over nearly every morning. Yet another juror very openly didn’t take notes once during the four months, and often appeared to be off in la-la land, which became a huge problem during deliberations-- he was a holdout, could not defend his position logically, and couldn’t remember why he felt the way he did, he just did.
Our judge allowed the jury to submit written questions to witnesses (which was unique to the judge in Indiana), and we had a couple of gun experts and a scientist on the jury… more than a few times, it wasn’t cross-examination that put a witness on the spot, it was the questions we asked. Not sure if they were appreciated by the judge, but allowing us to clear up holes in testimony helped those of us who bothered to take notes in our later deliberations.
My mum served on a jury in an indecent assault case in the early 1980s. Very roughly the case was a man who had met an underaged boy in an amusement arcade, they’d gone back to his house and lay down to sleep on his bed, the man behind the boy in a ‘spoons’ kind of position. The boy’s allegation was that at some point he had been awoken by the man engaged in anal intercourse with him, without the boy’s consent.
During the jury deliberations one of the jury, an elderly lady from a clearly refined social background was having endless problems understanding the testimony. Eventually, it became clear what her problem was: she didn’t believe the boy’s story on the simple grounds that it wasn’t physically possible for people (men or women) to have sex from behind. The strange jury behaviour, sadly, was forced on my poor mother (mid 40s at this point, but herself ‘sensible’ and pragmatic, rather than particularly worldly-wise). The other jurors voted that my mum should take this sweet old dear to a quiet corner and give her some sex education. Not entirely what she’d expected from jury duty.
I once served on a jury where I honestly believe that we spent more time discussing what exactly the “M-H” word was than we did discussing the legal aspects of the trial.
OK, that’s probably not quite true, but it was a “he said, she said” rape trial, and we quickly decided that the defendent had in fact raped the woman he had been living with.
We then had to wait while the court got ready to resume–whatever exactly that entailed–and discussed the “M-H” word. Which was apparently more offensive than the M-F word, because the defendent wouldn’t tell us what it meant, and he did define the M-F word–which we’d already figured out.
I also served on a jury with a woman who firmly believed that Cops Lie and Jails are Full of Innocent People. She pissed off the rest of us–who thought the defendent on that jury was guilty of more than being drunk in public, and thus avoiding the Police.
Finally, one of my fellow jurors in the first case above had been a hostage in a bank robbery a year or so before, and that trial was finally going to start–just in the nick of time to prevent the Statute of Limitations from running out ( or at least something related to it).
So they rounded up everyone in the jury pool for the month who wasn’t already on a jury, and discovered that between the people who’d read about the case in the paper, and the people who’d heard about the former hostage turned member of the jury pool’s experiences as a hostage in a case soon to come to trial . . .
There were not enough people left to fill a jury. So they continued the trial, and hoped they’d be able to resume it later without violating the accused’s right to a speedy trial.
I finally got called for jury duty two years ago. Being a total dork, I was excited…
So a small group of us head to the courtroom, to be whittled down to 12, and I find out the case involved a party I had become familar with in my own job as a paralegal. It was a fire insurance dispute, and the private “fire investigator” for the plaintiff was the same guy who we had named as a co-defendant in our case - a fraud matter involving his work as a “fire investigator”
The jury box was filled before I had my turn to be questioned, but I knew I could never be on that jury. I hate to say it, but it would have been impossible for me to put aside what I knew about this guy, and just base my decision on the courtroom poceedings. I was disappointed, and a little surprised that I couldn’t be impartial - I always think of my myself as fair.
One question remains - if I had made it be questioned, I would of course had to disclose my prior dealings with this guy. I think that it would be improper to announce this in front of the rest of the jurors (“I know that guy - We sued him for fraud and arson!”). Would it have been correct to ask the judge for a sidebar to explain it?
I’ll be interested to see what he has to say, if he’d care to post his answer publicly. I’ve seen that questions from the jury are allowed in some states; in Indiana, at least when I served, the judge was seen as something of a maverick for permitting it.
Here’s how it worked in his courtroom: we didn’t directly question witnesses. We would submit questions in writing to the bailiff after both sides had finished with the witness, and the attorneys would approach the bench. The judge would read each question over, and if he deemed the question permissible, each attorney would read it to see if they approved. The questions that were approved (about 50%) would then be read aloud by the judge.
The only time I served on a jury (and I’ve got jury duty until the 18th - I just haven’t been called yet) a fellow juror showed up in tennis whites. After we retired to the jury room she declared, “He’s guilty and you can’t convince me otherwise. I have a tennis match in 25 minutes so let’s get this done with.”
Depends on how your courtroom handled voir dire questioning. If you had written questionnaires, obviously no problem. Blurting out your reasons in open court would have probably poisoned the venire, so if you were asked publicly, everyone involved would have probably appreciated it if you’d said, “May I discuss this privately?”
And if for some bizarre reason you were told, “No, please answer,” then you’ve done your part and the chips can fall where they may.
Thanks!