When you put a dozen of so strangers in a jury room together, weird things happen.
That’s certainly been the case recently in Chicago, where the current big news is that the defense team for former Illinois Governor George Ryan is seeking a new trial based on jury misconduct after the jury convicted Ryan on all 18 counts of a federal corruption indictment in a six-month trial earlier this year (previous post here). Although jury misconduct motions are always longshots, based on news reports, this one has a better than typical chance if only a few of the allegations of juror misconduct turn out to be true.
In the Ryan case, the allegation is that one of the jurors looked up a definition of “good faith deliberations” in attempting to persuade a holdout juror that she was not deliberating in good faith. Inasmuch as the holdout was ultimately dismissed from the panel for unrelated reasons, the trial judge denied Ryan’s first juror misconduct motion. However, Ryan’s defense team is now demanding a new hearing into allegations that there was so much pressure put on the holdout — and so many other jurors either lied in their jury questionnaire forms or did not follow the court’s instructions — that the jury deliberations were utterly skewed and a new trial is required.
Such conduct is a growing issue in high-profile trials as information about such trials is readily available to jurors who routinely work or engage in recreation on their computers each day. This is particularly important in a case such as Lay-Skilling, where pre-trial motions indicated widespread bias (see also here) against the defendants among prospective jurors. During the trial, several media outlets — including the hometown newspaper, the Houston Chronicle — covered the trial by innovatively blending traditional media reports and columns with blogging and podcasts. Although a valuable resource for the general public, such coverage could easily affect jurors who disregard the court’s instruction not to read ongoing media reports about the trial. For example, before and during the Lay-Skilling trial, the Chronicle’s Enron webpage prominently promoted the newspaper’s business columnist’s columns and blog that regularly ridiculed the defendants and called for their conviction, and also promoted regular blog posts from a former Enron Task Force prosecutor. It is certainly the media’s perogative to cover a trial in that manner, but the potential effect of such coverage on the jury pool would seem to mitigate strongly in favor of a more liberal rule in favor of changing the venue of such trials than has traditionally been applied.