I’ve seen several Law & Order episodes where they poll the jury after they render their verdict, asking each individual juror what their vote is.
Ok, I understand that they are making certain that it was a unanimous verdict, but is it really neccesary as anything other than a formality? Has a juror ever stood up and said “No, I change my mind, Not Guilty!” Has that ever happened?
I’ve heard of a case where a jury returned a “unanimous” verdict, but didn’t actually understand what “unanimous” means. It’s mentioned here along with some other examples of jurors changing their minds at the last minute.
Well, at least one case last fall in Wisconsin, I think, had a jury poll that resulted in one juror saying he wasn’t so sure of the verdict after all. The judge refused to accept the jury verdict, sent the jury back to deliberate, and they ultimately returned a unanimous guilty.
I tried a case a few years ago (back when I was on the prosecution side) - local firefighter charged with sexually assaulting his niece over a period of months. There were 8 counts (IIRC) and the jury was convinced it all happened, just was not convinced one incident occurred on the date charged. The jury found him guilty of 7 counts. The foreman wrote the verdict out and found him not guilty of the wrong count. Polling the jury quickly straightened it out.
Also, it gives one’s lunatic defendant one last chance to mad-dog eyeball each individual member of the jury while drawing his finger across his throat in a last ditch effort at intimidation. This is only marginally effective in a legal sense, but can be hugely important for the television movie.
What’s with the television and movie ritual where the judge asks the foreman if they’ve reached a verdict, the foreman answers yes, the written verdict is given to the bailiff, the bailiff gives it to the judge, the judge reads it silently before handing it back to the bailiff and finally it’s read by the jury foreman? Is this so the judge gets to know the verdict before anyone else? It seems unnecessarily complicated. Why not just read it aloud to begin with?
Perhaps to give the judge a chance to over-rule the verdict or confer with the jury if he/she believes they have got it entirely wrong.
The following happened on a jury I was on in the UK, so the rules were rather different, but it’s effectively just such an example.
We’d unanimously found the defendent guiltly, informed the usher that a verdict had been reached, been told to sit tight while the court reassembled and were waiting to be called into court. One juror then basically went apeshit in the jury room, denouncing the verdict and threatening the rest of us. Both the rest of us and the usher had already sized him up as mentally unstable days before, so the decision on the part of the usher was to challenge him: if he had anything to say, say it to the judge in the courtroom. As is normal in the UK, the foreman was merely asked to relay the verdict verbally to the court and the jury is not then individually polled. Cowed by the circumstances, the dissident juror said nothing.
I suspect a good defence lawyer could have got a reasonable appeal out of this course of events, had it become known to anyone other than the jury and the usher. But the rest of us on the jury certainly felt that justice had still been done, even if the experience of a violent juror in a small room had been unnerving. (Anyway, had we stalled at 11-1 the judge would almost certainly have allowed a majority verdict.)
It happens in real life, too. Generally it’s done so that the judge can make sure that the jury filled the form out right before the verdict is read.
Most of the time the verdict form (criminal or civil) has questions on it. Those questions are the ones the jury has to answer to reach a verdict. There may be one question: “Do you find the defendant guilty of possessing a gun?” The jury then circles yes or no.
In more complicated cases, the jury essentially has to do a Choose Your Own Adventure questionnaire:
Did the plaintiff and the defendant enter into a contract? Yes or No. If Yes, go to Question 2. If No, sign and date the form below.
Did the contract contain a term relating to water? Yes or No. If Yes, go to Question 3. If No, sign and date the form below.
Etc., etc.
So the judge reviews the form to make sure it’s filled out right. If the form has, say, 10 questions, and the jury has to answer all 10 “yes” in order to rule for the plaintiff, and the jury has answered 7 “no” and “3” yes, but still written in “judgment for the plaintiff,” the judge knows s/he has to deal with that.
Once case I saw had the jury filling out the verdict form, answering all the questions so as to render a defense verdict, but then filling in “$1 million” in the spot reserved for plaintiff’s damages. Because they found for the defendant, they shouldn’t have filled out the amount of the plaintiff’s damages. So, judge had to confer with the lawyers, then poll the jury, I believe, to sort it out.
A few years ago here we had a capital (death penalty) murder case. The jury had agreed the defendant was guilty and then voted for death in the penalty phase. When the jury was polled, one juror suddenly switched from death to a life sentence. I don’t recall for sure, but I believe the jury was supposed to agree unanimously on the death penalty.
A Canadian perspective here… I served on a jury for a second degree murder trial. Once we had reached our verdict, the “foreman” (in our case the juror who happened to be seated closest the judge) simply wrote our decision on a slip of paper that the jury matron then handed on to the judge. He read it, then asked the foreman if we had reached a verdict (yes), then if we had found the defendant guilty of second degree murder (no), then if we had found the defendant guilty of manslaughter (yes).
The defence lawyer asked that the jury be polled, it’s a step that pretty much has to be taken by the losing side just to ensure that they have done everything possible, either for their client or for the state. I do have a vague recollection of reading about a trial where the judge mis-heard the foreman to say guilty when the jury had in fact reached the opposite verdict. The poor accused was locked away and spent several months in prison before the mistake was corrected.
I was wondering, if the jury returns a verdict of not guilty to a case the prosecutor was sure he/she would get a guilty verdict, is it in the best interest of each juror to refuse the exit poll? I thought there was a thread about this not so long ago where a vindictive, sore loser prosecutor would threaten jurors with fraud if they didn’t return a verdict he/she wanted.
I have only seen the jury foreman read the verdict in TV and movies. In real cases I’ve seen or heard in person or in the news, the court clerk reads the verdict. This happened in the O.J. case, for example.
I have noticed, by the way, that the clerk always reads the verdict quickly with very little expression. I’m sure it’s because the court is supposed to be disinterested in the verdict.
As for why the judge reads the verdict forms before the verdict is read, I’m sure it’s to ensure that the forms are filled out properly and consistently. Even in a simple case, the jury foreman has to put his signature in the right place. In more complex cases, the jury may have to decide which crime a defendant is guilty of, if any (for example, manslaughter, second-degree murder or first-degree murder).
As for medstar’s question, I would say that a juror doesn’t have to worry about talking to a prosecutor when the case is over. If I were on a jury where the prosecutor threatened me after the case, I would report him or her to the judge.
In a case I worked on (not O.J.), the clerk rather than the jury foreperson read the verdict because there was media coverage. The jury did not want to be on TV, but the media wanted the compelling footage of someone reading the verdict. So the poor clerk had to do it.
It may also be because the clerk, unlike the lawyers, judge, and jury, is unfamiliar with the verdict form. When s/he reads it, it may be the first time s/he has seen the form.
But wouldn’t it be fun if verdicts were read like the Oscar winners are announced?
The clerk of the court in most cases is a lawyer, so I would assume s/he is familiar with such a form.
I’ve been on two juries that have delivered verdicts. One civil and one criminal.
In each case, the clerk of the court read the verdict. We weren’t polled for the civil case.
For the criminal case, we found the defendant guilty and then we came back to court. The presiding juror (that was the name we were told to use) handed the verdict in a sealed envelope to the bailiff. Bailiff gives it to the judge. The judge then read it and then asked us, “So you found the defendant guilty, is that correct?”
Then the clerk formally read the verdict.
Then we got polled.
Then I checked out and went home.
Really? That hasn’t been my experience, but YMMV.
For clarification, when I said that the clerk was likely unfamiliar with the verdict form, that’s because the lawyers draft it, the judge approves it, and the jury fills it out. The first time the clerk generally reads the verdict form is when the case is over. And “verdict form” is a bit misleading. While it’s based on standard forms, it’s generally drafted individually for each case.
I’ve always thought that court clerks were just people who worked their way up through the court system as any other clerical job in the U.S.
Tell me more about these forms… Who decides what’s on 'em? What sort of legal force do they have? Seems to me the jury can rule whatever way they want for whatever reasons they want.
Seems like if you kept getting juries that didn’t understand that they’d have to answer “yes” to 7 to rule for the plantiff… that would indicate that there was something wrong with the legal wickets as defined by the law and that the law was out of step with the population. Whatever the topic is for 7 should be rewritten in the legal code to reflect the wishes of the people.
But that would require not sending the juries back because they “filled the form out wrong”. All that’ll get you is people that deliberate, come to a conclusion, and then fill the form out “right” to reflect the desired end result. No useful feedback.
I think what happened in the case above is that the jury filled out the form with a series of decisions that contradicted each other.
Sort of like, “We think the plaintiff proved his case in nearly every aspect of his case. So he loses.”
My criminal case has two questions:
The civil case was an unlawful detainer (eviction) case.
We could
We went for 3 mainly because we thought that the landlord had failed to maintain the property well enough to make it habitable.
After the case was over, we found out that the defendant was a professional pain in the ass tenant. He knew how to work the system so he could live pretty much anywhere rent-free. Sort of like the movie “Pacific Heights”.