Opinion ID: 2632348
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: What Happens When Jurors Are Uninformed of Their Duty to Report Misconduct?

Text: The majority's disapproval of CALJIC No. 17.41.1 rests on a single unexamined and unsupported assumption: Nothing in our experience suggests that these [other pattern] instructions have proved inadequate over the years to discourage juror misconduct during deliberations. (Maj. opn., ante, 121 Cal.Rptr.2d at p. 872, 49 P.3d at p. 218.) Our experience, in my view, proves just the opposite. Jury misconduct is a problem that has vexed courts from the inception of the jury system and offered one of the earliest recognized justifications for a new trial at common law. (See Thayer, A Preliminary Treatise on Evidence at the Common Law (1898) 169.) In modern times, [misconduct affecting the jury is frequently put forward as a reason why a new trial should be granted. (3 Wright, Federal Practice & Procedure: Criminal (2d ed.1982) § 554, p. 248.) Indeed, [p]ost-trial hearings on alleged juror misconduct or other matters affecting the rationality of the verdict are an increasingly common phenomenon. (Smith-Cabranes, Faults, Fallacies, and the Future of our Criminal Justice System: The Criminal Jury in our Time (1995) 3 Va. J.Soc. Pol'y & L. 133, 144, fn. 59.) A survey of state and federal trial judges in 1995 revealed that state trial judges were more likely to have witnessed jury misconduct than were federal judges, that several forms of misconduct were more common in criminal cases than in civil cases, and that California judges reported misconduct more often than judges in other states. (King, Juror Delinquency in Criminal Trials in America, 1796-1996 (1996) 94 Mich. L.Rev. 2673, 2737, 2739 (hereafter King).) It therefore should not be surprising that those who are concerned with the administration of justice might develop an instruction for state criminal trials in California. The instruction was not a solution in search of a problem. Our own experience confirms the available data. Time after time, this court, the Courts of Appeal, and trial courts have been compelled to order new trials because of the postverdict discovery of juror misconduct. (E.g., People v. Nesler (1997) 16 Cal.4th 561, 579-584, 66 Cal.Rptr.2d 454, 941 P.2d 87 [remanding for new sanity trial because of postverdict discovery that juror had received extraneous information and had shared it with fellow jurors]; Province v. Center for Women's Health & Family Birth (1993) 20 Cal.App.4th 1673, 1678-1680, 25 Cal.Rptr.2d 667; Lankster v. Alpha Beta Co. (1993) 15 Cal.App.4th 678, 681, 18 Cal.Rptr.2d 923; People v. Castro (1986) 184 Cal.App.3d 849, 851, 229 Cal.Rptr. 280; People v. Brown (1976) 61 Cal.App.3d 476, 478-79, 132 Cal.Rptr. 217; People ex rel. Dept. Pub. Wks. v. Curtis (1967) 255 Cal.App.2d 378, 388-390, 63 Cal.Rptr. 138.) Our experience should also include the numerous occasions in which the federal courts have upset California criminal judgments because of the belated discovery of juror misconduct. (E.g., Sassounian v. Roe (9th Cir.2000) 230 F.3d 1097, 1111 [overturning special circumstance finding where the judge never had an opportunity to diminish the prejudicial effect of the extraneous information. Because he did not know that the jury found out about the phone call until after the verdict, the jury was never told not to consider it]; Lawson v. Borg (9th Cir.1995) 60 F.3d 608, 610 [overturning first degree murder conviction where juror's statements during deliberations as to defendant's violent reputation came to light only in motion for new trial]; Marino v. Vasquez (9th Cir.1987) 812 F.2d 499, 503 [overturning murder and attempted murder convictions where information presented in motion for new trial revealed that a juror performed an unauthorized experiment and presented results to the other jurors as part of deliberations]; Keenan v. Woodford (N.D.Cal., Jan. 10, 2001, No. 89-CV-2167 DLJ) 2001 WL 835856, , fn. 1 [overturning judgment of death where juror's threat to kill dissenting juror during deliberations came to light only in motion for new trial].) The majority acknowledges, as it must, that jurors have no right to refuse to deliberate or to disregard the law in reaching their decision. (Maj. opn., ante, 121 Cal.Rptr.2d at p. 864, 49 P.3d at p. 211.) The majority also does not dispute that jurors have a duty to report such misconduct to the court. (See People v. Williams (2001) 25 Cal.4th 441, 451, 106 Cal.Rptr.2d 295, 21 P.3d 1209 [jurors are required to follow the trial court's instructions]; id. at p. 452, 106 Cal.Rptr.2d 295, 21 P.3d 1209 [`the judge must be permitted to instruct the jury on the law and to insist that the jury follow his instructions' ].) The problem is that the majority, other than disapproving this instruction, fails to articulate how trial courts may properly inform jurors of that duty, apparently assuming instead that jurors will discover this duty on their own. [1] The foregoing cases demonstrate the error of the majority's approach. The fact common to all of those cases is that the misconduct justifying the new trials was not discovered until after the verdict had been renderedeven though the underlying facts were known to jurors before the verdict. ( In re Stankewitz (1985) 40 Cal.3d 391, 397, 220 Cal.Rptr. 382, 708 P.2d 1260 [jury misconduct during deliberations is most often raised by motion for new trial and appeal].) Experience thus confirms the obvious: some jurors are unaware of their ability or duty to report misconduct to the judge. If the jurors remain silent, most instances of jury misconduct will go undetected. (Edwards, A Judge's Review of Juror Misconduct (1984) 27 How. L.J. 1519, 1520.) Unless we are willing to gamble that each jury will stumble onto the correct path, it is appropriate that jurors be informed of their duty to report misconduct. (King, supra, 94 Mich. L.Rev. at p. 2748 [remedies for misconduct that operate before a verdict is reached have significant advantages over postverdict remedies].)