Some Jury Changes

I was reading an article talking about the Robert Blake civil trial. The thrust of the article was that, like the O.J. Simpson case before, the results of the criminal case (both not guilty of homicide) did not match the verdicts in the civil cases (both thought more likely than not to have been a party to homicide). The concern is whether this is “Celebrity Justice” — that because of perceived “deep pockets”, an accused celebrity is in danger of essentially being tried twice for the same offense (never mind that criminal and civil courts are different animals).

I’m not worried about any of that. But it did get me to think about how celebrity can affect juries. Let’s start with an except from Amendment VI from the U.S. Constitution:

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed…”

“Impartial jury.”

I can think of many cases where this is unlikely, and the history of the United States is littered with examples of jury partiality. Celebrity certainly complicates matters. So I couldn’t help but wonder…is there some way around that?

Nowhere in the Constitution or the Amendments is any mention made of where the jury must be, or in what manner the case must be presented to them. So I’m thinking that a “fair recreating” of a case (using actors/avatars/whatever) where all identification is pseudonymous might give more accurate results.

For example, it was reported (and I make no guarantee of the accuracy of my memory) that when O.J. was being tried, another man, a much-lower-on-the-lifestyle-ladder public-defender-represented man, was being tried for a case with similar circumstances (but not nearly the TV exposure, nor, likely, the same result). What if the jury watched instead presentations of cases and reasonably accurate recreations of testimony…but not know if it was Simpson’s case, or ladder-man’s case? The defendant would just be “Bob”. Would taking the personalities out of it make for different verdicts?

But, of course, this would probably never work. You’d have to decide how accurate the actor/avatar needed to be. The lawyers would have a field day with pre-trial motions. Gridlock would surely ensue.

OK…That won’t work. How about this: Put juries in a room separate from the trial. They get video feeds allowing for a full view of the court, but it prevents counsels from playing to the crowd, and it keeps jury members reasonably anonymous (important in some criminal trails). After all, nowhere in Amendment VI does it say that the accused gets to confront the jury.

This also means that jury time can be managed. Instead of having to drag themselves to court every day, not knowing how much of their time is actually going to be spent viewing the trial, the trial can be recorded and then played back all at once. Side-bars and other jury no-nos can be completely silenced so as not to affect what they hear, and dead time edited out. The jury just comes in, watches their trial, and then gets to the business of rendering a decision. None of this waiting around the jury room for most of a day because of motions or physical unavailability of necessary parties. Until the day comes when juries get to ask questions during a trial, there is no reason for it all to have to be real-time.