Opinion ID: 6500514
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: District Court’s Response to Report of

Text: Juror Misconduct79 Finally, the Defendants fault the District Court for not inquiring, to the degree they wanted, into an alternate’s report of a discussion about the case among three jurors while being transported from the courthouse to their cars. As explained above, the District Court questioned the alternate when he brought the issue up, then questioned the marshal who was driving the transportation van, but the Court declined the Defendants’ subsequent request to allow them to interview the alternate, the van driver, and the entire jury for any other communications about the case. As a result, the Defendants tell us, the District Court was unable to evaluate the full extent of misconduct and the prejudice to the Defendants, and we, in turn, are unable to engage in meaningful review of the Court’s decision and thus must order a retrial. Generally, “[j]uror questioning is a permissible tool where juror misconduct is alleged, and we have encouraged its use in such investigations.” Boone, 458 F.3d at 327. But to mitigate “intrusion into jury deliberations[,]” “a district court should be more cautious in investigating juror misconduct during deliberations than during trial, and should be exceedingly careful to avoid any disclosure of the content of deliberations.” Id. at 329. Thus, we require “substantial evidence of jury misconduct … during deliberations [before] a district court may, within its sound discretion, investigate the 79 “This Court reviews a trial court’s response to allegations of juror misconduct for abuse of discretion.” Boone, 458 F.3d at 326. 122 allegations through juror questioning or other appropriate means.” Id. Further, as we stated in United States v. Resko, “there is a clear doctrinal distinction between evidence of improper intra-jury communications and extra-jury influences[,]” as the latter “pose a far more serious threat to the defendant’s right to be tried by an impartial jury.” 3 F.3d 684, 690 (3d Cir. 1993). That distinction exists because, with intrajury communications, “the proper process for jury decisionmaking has been violated, but there is no reason to doubt that the jury based its ultimate decision only on evidence formally presented at trial.” Id. The Defendants rely heavily on Resko, where, after a juror informed a court officer that jurors were discussing the case during recesses and while waiting in the jury room, the court discovered that all twelve jurors had engaged in such discussions. Id. at 687-88. Although the misconduct involved merely intra-jury communications, we held that it was an abuse of discretion for the district court to rely solely on a brief questionnaire asking each juror whether they had discussed the case (everyone answered “yes”) and, if so, whether they had formed an opinion from those discussions (everyone answered “no”). Id. at 691. By stopping there, we held, the district court left unanswered critical questions about the nature and extent of those discussions. Id. at 690-91. But the key difference between Resko – “a difficult case” in “which our holding [was] limited,” id. at 690, 695 – and this case is that, here, the evidence of intra-juror communications was limited to an isolated event among just a few jurors. In Resko, the triggering complaint came from a juror who broadly claimed, one week into trial, that jurors discussed the case. Id. at 687. The court then learned that all 123 jurors engaged in such discussions. Id. at 688. Here, by contrast, an alternate notified the court of one specific discussion among three jurors, which occurred over six months after trial commenced. Given the narrow scope of the alternate’s allegations, the Court was within its discretion to question only the alternate and the marshal about the particular incident, but to deny the Defendants’ requests to question the entire deliberating jury about all communications dating back to the start of trial. Cf. Boone, 458 F.3d at 330 (no abuse of discretion to question only the juror who was allegedly refusing to deliberate). Further distinguishing this case from Resko, the alleged misconduct here occurred after deliberations had begun, when the District Court necessarily was more hesitant to intrude. Boone, 458 F.3d at 329. It was certainly within its discretion to consider the potential effect of that intrusion and so to conduct a more limited and targeted inquiry into the allegation.