Up to now, stories of jurors Twitting, Facebooking or Googling tend to be about the process, the use of technology to do what they were never supposed to do. This time was different. From the Concord Monitor via Anne Reed :The juror who derailed a sexual assault trial in March by telling jurors the defendant was a convicted child molester agreed yesterday to reimburse the court nearly $1,200 for his misconduct.
No regrets. Christiansen found out (as if it was hard to do) about the defendant’s prior, and he decided, Paul Christiansen decided, that the rest of the jury needed to know about it. Not only does it tell what jurors think of propensity evidence, but that the entirety of the law is subject to the personal revision of one juror’s sensibilities. Christiansen decided, and that was that.
Paul Christiansen of Danbury revealed Timothy Townsend’s prior conviction during the second day of deliberations on new child sexual assault charges, according to court records. He said afterward that he had no regrets because he believed jurors need to know about Townsend’s past.
The revelation forced a mistrial, and now the Merrimack County Attorney’s Office has to retry Townsend and again put the 9-year-old alleged victim on the stand.
The penalty was $1,200, to cover the cost for the jurors after the scuttled trial. This neither beings to cover the cost, nor even recognizes that the cost of the jury stipend is the least of the price for his conduct. There’s the testimony of a 9 year old, who is now forced to take the stand. There is the trauma to the defendant, who has lost the rest of his seated jury as well as the toll of starting trial anew. The defense lawyer. The prosecutor. The judge and court staff. Everything lost, and not even considered worthy of inclusion in the penalty.
This was not an innocent juror. Not only did he violate the instructions and go looking, but he decided, after he found what he felt was overwhelmingly important information of the defendant’s history, that it was up to him to spread the news. It’s all up to him, everything else happening in that courtroom be damned.
Innocuous twits about the trial may make for interesting fodder for blog posts and technology lovers, but this was real. And as information becomes increasingly available online, and as use of tech becomes increasingly ubiquitous (if it isn’t already), this is the future we have to deal with. As jurors becomes this actively involved in the process, initiating investigations on their own and then acting upon their discovery, it compels the imposition of some sanction for the havoc they wreak.
Nobody really wants to go after jurors. It’s hard enough to get normal people to come out and serve. But if this is going to happen, then something needs to be done to stop it, and deter others from spending their evenings checking the sex offender registries, just for fun. The $1,200 cost doesn’t appear to be adequate to have made Christiansen wish that he didn’t do it. And certainly won’t compensate everyone else involved.
Anybody know how to stuff the genie back in the bottle? Anybody know how to make jurors not decide to remake the law to suit whatever strikes them as a good idea? And the next time a judge makes light of the significance of propensity evidence, remind her of this case, where the juror just couldn’t control himself given how critical the criminal history seemed to him.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
There are loose cannons with attitudes everyehere. No one is going to tell them what to do. Don’t like the judge’s instructiosn? Ignore them or fly in their face. There is another set of jerkwads who belive, if on a jury, that you can set your own law if you don’t agree with the one being tried. I was a juror with one of these idiots and it was hot and heavy.These clowns listen to who knows who and then decide they are going to revamp the legal system on their own and no one is going to tell them otherwise. Would contempt incarceration cover this? If not heavy fine, incarceration and strict, zero tolerance enforcement are the only practical solutions that come to my feeble mind.
Well, Scott, it’s the right question and the answer is always the same: there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle, no way to get the toothpaste back in the tube. Jurors are going to do this kind of thing. If you punish it severely you’ll just drive it underground.
Maybe the thing to do is rethink the admissibility of propensity evidence. If you get it out on the table you might be better able to deal with it than you think. In any case, that would be preferable to having some juror find some damning evidence that the court is keeping from him and deciding guilt or innocence based on that.
When something is inevitable you can’t fight it. Maybe anything a juror is likely to find out on his own should be admissible and we deal with the impact of that. I don’t know, though. It’s a tough one.
A problem for me is that everything online comes back to the issue that it isn’t necessarily true. The juror may come across horrific stories about a person with the same name, or stories about that person which are fabricated or later shown to be incorrect. It’s a bit rich to say that lawyers are better at presenting the truth than jurors but at least there’s substantial consequences if they mess up. It so happens that this individual was correctly identified but that’s not necessarily true in all cases.
I think that, no matter what your view on previous convictions, it’s entirely unreasonable to make a lawyer stand up and say “Joe Smith is a convicted war criminal, but it’s a different Joe Smith to this one on trial today so if you Google him you’ll find things about that other guy.”
I agree it is the web of a billion facts and maybe a million are true.
Why do you immediately leap to the assumption that something needs to be done to stop it? Why don’t you instead consider reforming your end of the stick? After all, only a fool would claim the information the juror provided was *not* epistemically relevant. Maybe something needs to be done to stop laywers and judges from failing to provide information to juries (especially information that any juror may have) that is manifestly epistemically relevant?
I’de be happy to let jurors know anything and everything… if only they understood the basic concept of presumption of innocence.
For some reason, society in general today seems to think that if you are charged, you must be guilty; if you exercise your rights (4th & 5th, especially) you must be hiding something; and if you have done something in the past, you must have done it again.
Scott? Scott?
Man, I can’t wait for the answer to this one.
I agree with those that suggest we should just tell jurors everything. Think how we could streamline the system. There would be no need for Sandoval hearings and we could suspend suppression hearings. After all, what would be the point of suppressing anything is the jurors would find out anyway. I am thinking if we do this correctly we will not need defense lawyers either. Just have cops tell their story and then jury vote. Wait–why even have jurors?
Why not have professional jurors? We could use retired police and probation officers.
Well, this is all funny but you might consider that on the whole, the rules of evidence favor the prosecution. Sandoval hearings are usually effective, but suppression hearings are a waste of time – not in theory but in practice. Judges almost never suppress anything the prosecution wants to offer, and that almost never results in a reversal on appeal.
Meanwhile, the prosecution can also offer such probative evidence as a bought off jailhouse snitch who says “The Defendant told me he did it!” because under the rules of evidence that is an admission. It never happened, but you can “argue” that after the bell is rung. Lots of luck. Jurors figure the judge wouldn’t let it in unless it was “reliable”, right?
Then again, when you go to offer evidence that is far less foul garbage, such as a not-bought-off witness who says that a different guy, not the Defendant, told the witness that HE did it, well, that is not admissible. Not to mention that any evidence tending to implicate someone other than the Defendant is usually ruled out with the admonition that “YOUR client is the one who is on trial here.”
As written the rules tend to favor the prosecution. As practiced they favor the prosecution even more.
Defense lawyers should be open to the idea that the rules should be substantially liberalized.
I’m just saying open to the idea. I’m not sure that I like it either, but I’ll think about it.
Oh yes, here’s another great real world scenario. They won’t let you produce the witness to whom the other guy confessed because it is “hearsay”, but you manage, through great effort, to get the other guy himself, but he’s going to take the fifth. Which is fine, you figure, because then you’re entitled to an instruction that the jury can draw an adverse inference from the guy’s invocation of the privilege.
The rules of evidence permit this, but only in theory. In practice no judge will ever let you do that. Too likely to result in an acquittal.
You might pull a fast one to get around the judge, but you’ll only get to do it once in your career. Which client do you spend it on?
No, no. He’s just a dumb kid. I will not disabuse him of his foolishness. Not even a quick prejudice versus probative. Nope. I just hope that his graduate work is in something appropriate, like animal husbandry.
I think what you have there is inequitable application in the courts as opposed to a systemic flaw in the rules. The problem you’re describing has little if anything to do with the rules of evidence.
I’m not saying that any particular judge doesn’t support prosecutors more than defenders but the rules don’t say “screw the defendant.”
David Mitchell (UK comedian) makes an analogy of people urinating in a swimming pools and then saying that swimming pools are a terrible idea because they’re full of urine when the problem is that people are urinating in the pool.
Virtually all judges favor prosecutors. It’s the nature of the beast. Let’s face it: the reason we have juries to begin with is that we don’t trust judges, and we shouldn’t.
The judge will therefore almost invariably use the rules of evidence – or disregard them, as the case may be, to influence the outcome in the prosecution’s favor. It’s a given, and if you need to win a trial you have to take that into account.
Gruesome crime scene pictures are a staple of prosecutors’ murder cases. They are almost always irrelevant to any issue in the trial, or at best far more prejudicial than probative, but are they ever excluded? Ever?
It’s a good analogy. It’s wrong to urinate in the pool, but if it’s universally done and you can’t live with it, maybe you do properly start thinking about doing away with pools.
Witnesses have to swear to tell the *whole* truth & nothing but….
It seems prosecution & defense should have to do the same. And yes, we’ll question till the sun dies as to what is actually true. When I’ve been a juror, do you think I believed half of what I heard? No, because I’ve seen & heard “truth” macerated or twisted beyond recognition. They could make Mother Theresa look like a child molester, or Bernie Madoff the greatest philanthropist that ever lived by simply providing a jury with a fraction of the truth.
It’s impossible to explain to a juror the myriad reasons why the law developed in the way it did, and why some evidence isn’t relevant, probative, reliable or constitutionally seized, and shouldn’t be allowed into the trial. Your comment is precisely why jurors are insulated from bad evidence; you believe there is some sort of “truth” when much of what you’re talking about isn’t fact or relevant, but appeals to prejudice and ignorance. The problem is that trials do make Mother Theresa look like a child molester, and you would convict her if you had the “truth”, when it’s not truth at all but what passes for meaningful information to people who don’t appreciate why assumptions, bias, “common sense” and anger are often used to taint people in the absence of proof that they committed a crime.