Opinion ID: 2628721
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Experiment Was Both Inherently Flawed and Potentially Persuasive.

Text: The conditions under which the experiment was carried out were gravely dissimilar to the conditions during the attack on Dayton. The superior court stated that the differences between the night setting with artificial light in Fairbanks and the conditions in Anchorage are very troubling. The record confirms that the lighting during the experiment was nothing like the lighting during the attack. The attack occurred at around 1 a.m. in Fairbanks on October 11. Streetlights apparently provided some lighting. The jury's experiment took place during daylight hours in Anchorage in mid-August, and several jurors testified that it was daylight, really bright, or sunny. The distance at which the jurors conducted the experiment was also probably dissimilar for testing Olson's testimony. A police officer measured the distance from where Dayton reported being attacked to the place where Olson stood at 550 feet. [16] The jurors' testimony and an affidavit submitted with Pease's application together indicated that the two groups of jurors were only 434 feet apart. [17] This difference of more than one hundred feet requires a conclusion that the circumstances of the experiment and the event were not substantially similar. If the jurors were markedly closer to each other than Olson was to Dayton, their experiment was flawed in a way that potentially prejudiced Pease by enhancing the credibility of Olson's testimony. The experiment's methodology was also flawed. There may be a notion the jurors simply made the same observations they permissibly could have made from the jury room windows. But observations from the windows of the jury room would likely have been of strangers on the streets, and would certainly not have been of fellow jurors who had been sitting and conversing together in close quarters for at least two weeks during selection, trial, and the initial deliberations. Instead, here one or two jurors walked away from their colleagues in broad daylight and then stood at a distant point before returning. Unlike almost all the experiments discussed in cases cited by the court of appeals, [18] this experiment was not conducted in the jury room, and in fact could not have been conducted without leaving the court building. And because, as the bailiff explained, the jurors had to stay together, one or two could not have exited the building and walked down the street while the remaining jurors watched them from the jury room windows. One of the unique flaws of this experimentthe continued observation of fellow jurors as they paced off the estimated distancecould not have occurred had the jury restricted itself to making observations only from inside the jury room. Also, all of the jurors would have recognized that observations from the jury room windows necessarily involved estimated distances and dissimilar conditions, but the formality of the group exercise in attempting to pace off the distance could have influenced jurors by adding a spurious sense of experimental precision. Such a test was not a valid test even of Dr. Loftus's optimal conditions opinion because the test was unacceptably suggestive. The remaining jurors had watched their known colleague or colleagues walk away. It is not surprising one juror would testify that others remarked that I can tell that is `so and so.' Had the prosecutor proposed such an experiment, Pease's trial lawyer could have raised a persuasive objection. And had the court nonetheless allowed the experiment, Dr. Loftus surely could have addressed its flaws and defense counsel could have sought a limiting instruction. But because the experiment occurred during deliberations and was not revealed for some years, neither Pease nor his expert had an opportunity to evaluate and confront this juror-developed evidence. Finally, we should conclude that the jury's collective conduct in going outside and carrying out the test potentially made this self-generated evidence particularly important and relevant to the jurors. The jury's collegial physical excursion for a shared purpose likely increased the experiment's seeming validity and communal importance. It is predictable and likely that the way the jurors conducted the experiment heightened their willingness to give it weight. That is especially so given that several jurors testified that they assumed that the excursion had been permitted by the bailiff or the trial judge, and all of the jurors must have been aware that the bailiff was present during the experiment.