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| FILE - The Supreme Court in this Feb. 17, 2016 file photo. The Supreme Court is weighing whether to hear a case involving claims of racial bias by a Colorado juror that features competing tenets of the legal system: the right to trial by an impartial jury versus the secrecy of jury deliberations. The court could say Monday whether it will take up the case in the fall. |
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The American jury room is a bit like Las Vegas: What happens there is supposed to stay there.
But
a Supreme Court appeal from a Hispanic defendant in Colorado raises the
prospect that a juror's comments during deliberations can be so
offensive that they deprive a defendant of a fair trial.
The
justices could say as early as Monday whether they will take up a case
in the fall involving competing tenets of the legal system: a
defendant's constitutional right to trial by an impartial jury, and the
need for secrecy in jury deliberations.
After a
jury convicted Miguel Angel Pena Rodriguez of attempted sexual assault
involving teenage sisters at a Denver-area horse race track, two jurors
provided his lawyer with sworn statements claiming that a third juror
made derogatory remarks about Mexican men before voting guilty.
"I
think he did it because he's Mexican and Mexican men take whatever they
want," is one of several racially tinged statements attributed to the
juror identified in court records by the initials H.C. In another
comment, the juror is said to have cast doubt on an alibi provided by a
Hispanic witness for Pena Rodriguez because the witness was "an
illegal." The witness testified that he was in the country legally.
But
three separate courts in Colorado said those statements could not be
used to upend Pena Rodriguez's conviction because of a long-standing
rule that prohibits jurors from testifying about what happens during
deliberations. The rule, found in both federal and state law, is
intended to promote the finality of verdicts and to shield jurors from
outside influences.
The Supreme Court also has been unwilling to intrude on deliberations.
In
a 5-4 ruling in 1987, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the majority
opinion that rejected calls for a hearing to explore allegations made by
jurors of drug and alcohol use by jurors during a criminal fraud trial.
"There
is little doubt that post-verdict investigation into juror misconduct
would in some instances lead to the invalidation of verdicts reached
after irresponsible or improper juror behavior. It is not at all clear,
however, that the jury system could survive such efforts to perfect it,"
O'Connor wrote.
In dissent, Justice Thurgood
Marshall said the right to an impartial jury was more important. "If, as
is charged, members of petitioners' jury were intoxicated as a result
of their use of drugs and alcohol to the point of sleeping through
material portions of the trial, the verdict in this case must be set
aside," he wrote.
In 2014, justices
unanimously reaffirmed the sanctity of jury deliberations. The court
rejected a challenge to a jury verdict in a civil case brought by a
motorcycle rider who had his left leg amputated as a result of a traffic
accident. He sought a new trial based on one juror's report that a
second juror said during deliberations that her daughter had been at
fault in a similar case and a lawsuit against the daughter would have
"ruined her life."
Justice Sonia Sotomayor's opinion in that case left open the possibility that some comments might go too far.
"There
may be cases of juror bias so extreme that, almost by definition, the
jury trial right has been abridged," Sotomayor wrote in a footnote to
her opinion.
Pena Rodriguez's case is one such
example, his lawyers wrote in their Supreme Court filing, because the
juror "injected racial animus into the deliberations."
His
legal team also said that the justices should resolve a split among
federal and state courts "on this manifestly important question" of
whether juror testimony can be used to demonstrate racial bias in
deliberations.
The NAACP Legal Defense and
Educational Fund and the National Congress of American Indians are among
the groups backing Pena Rodriguez, cataloguing examples of trials in
which jurors uttered slurs or made derogatory remarks about Native
American, African-American and Hispanic defendants.
Opposing
the high court's involvement in this case, Colorado Attorney General
Cynthia Coffman wrote that the verdict was based on overwhelming
evidence and that no juror suggested that the offensive comments
affected or persuaded anyone else. Coffman also said Pena Rodriguez's
lawyer might have picked up on the juror's alleged bias during jury
selection, but failed to ask any questions about race or ethnicity.
The case is Pena Rodriguez v. Colorado, 15-606.
