We are aware of juries being tampered with to allow defendents to get a “not guilty” result. Has there ever been a case of jury tampering to get a “guilty” result ? I realize it would be much tougher to accomplish but has it ever been done ?
It probably is very, very rare. It’s not exactly the same as jury tampering but during the OJ trial I heard a lawyer say that if they could prove the police had framed OJ then the police who did the framing would go to prison for a long time. So jury tampering for a guilty verdict might very well bring a long sentence too.
One of the times John Gotti was aquitted he bribed a juror to vote not guilty. I don’t know what happened to the juror.
Depends what you mean by tampering. There have been numerous guilty verdicts set aside due to improper influences but are usually a bit less blatant then I think you are looking for. For instance where jurors have discussed the case with third parties who urge conviction or offer outside information. Some cases have involved investigating officers discussing the case with individual jurors including one I recall where a juror was advised (falsely) that the accused had confessed. We had a famous recent case in Canada (r v. latimer) where potential jurors were interviewed by police before the trial.
I would be amazed if there weren’t some cases out there where friends or family of the victim threatened a jury member.
If I may get slightly off the OP, I have always wondered whether someone who gets off by bribing a juror could be retried. I don’t recall hearing about such a situation and always assumed that “double jeopardy” prevented a retrial. Of course jury tampering would normally be difficult to prove, but if it could be proved would a retrial be possible? It seems to me that the courts could rule that the constitution doesn’t protect someone from double jeopardy if the initial not guilty verdict was the result of the crime of jury tampering.
Somebody with more knowledge of U.S. law than I will probably clarify this; but it’s my understanding that this is not considered a ‘double jeopardy’ situation. The original trial would be declared a mistrial, i.e. not a trial at all …
I think once a trial is over they cannot declare a mistrial.
I am pretty sure in the case of Gotti they did not discover the bribe until after the trial. So he could not go on trial again. He was later convicted in a new trial on different charges.
While fictional, “The Runaway Jury” by John Grisham addresses BOTH sides of a court case (dead smoker’s widow takes on big bad tobacco company) trying to fix the verdict.
A lot of the stuff in that book is based on true events, so it might be a start?
If you could find a website addressing jury tampering in tobacco cases, you might could find something there too.