Juries

The standard we expect from juries today just isn’t realistic. We expect a jury to enter a courtroom with no preconceived ideas of the case, no knowledge of what happened, and to not personally know anyone involved with the case. I listened to a conversation about the Clancy trial recently while I was at work and marveled at the direction it took.

To be completely honest, I haven’t followed the case much at all. I know the bare basics, but some of the women (yes, I work with a room full of women) have watched the trial from beginning to end.

One of the women, a paramedic, said she is getting her degree in forensics. She claimed that the husband did it, and further stated that, should this case result in a mistrial, they should charge the husband with the children’s deaths. It’s as if she has been watching a television show whodunit and is trying to figure out the plot.

A second woman agreed, saying there is no way that the mother killed her kids.

I chimed in, and admitted to not knowing any of the facts of the case, but I did say that the mother had confessed. The response was “Well, she said she doesn’t remember anything from that day, so how can she confess? I think the husband drugged her, and the only reason she says she did it is because everyone told her she did.”

Then they went on to say that, since this trial has had so much press, there is no way to find a jury who hasn’t heard about the case, therefore the woman can’t get a fair trial.

That isn’t how juries work. Do you think in 1790, when the right to a trial was created, the small towns where people lived could contain a jury of people who didn’t know anything or anyone about a criminal case?

A great example of this is Princeton, New Jersey. James Madison, who wrote the initial proposals for the constitutional amendments guaranteeing the right to a jury trial, lived there. It was a small village during the founding era: the Princeton Battlefield Society describes 60–80 families in 1776, and Princeton’s alumni magazine estimates no more than 300 residents living in the town in 1783. Any criminal trials in that town would have had a jury who knew either the case or the persons involved.

That’s fine. In Irvin v. Dowd (1961), the Supreme Court explained that jurors need not be “totally ignorant of the facts and issues involved.” They must be able to set aside prior opinions and decide on the evidence presented in court. (The Court nevertheless overturned that conviction because of actual prejudice.)

However, if reports I am hearing are correct, some of the jurors are interacting and participating in online support groups for the defendant. That is not allowed at all. The lawyers in the next trial will have to do some significant scrubbing and scrutiny of prospective juror’s social media presence to ensure there aren’t any activists from either side of the debate who wind up on the jury, then the jury will need to be strictly sequestered for the duration of the trial to ensure no insertion of bias.