Court Opinion

ID: 9472674
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:07:07.629831+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:04.048039
License: Public Domain

JAMES DICKSON PHILLIPS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
With all respect for the majority’s rightful concern for the defendants’ right to trial by an impartial jury, I would not find an abuse of discretion in the trial judge’s refusal to declare a mistrial in this case. Accordingly, I dissent.
The right to trial by an impartial jury is of course fundamental, and the majority rightly emphasizes that it must be jealously secured, even at the expense of the delay and expense and possibilities of miscarriages of justice occasioned by requiring new trials. But the means available to the system for insuring impartiality are most imperfect ones given the subtleties involved. See McDonough Power Equipment Co. v. Greenwood, — U.S.-,-, 104 S.Ct. 845, 848, 78 L.Ed.2d 663 (1984). The system does the best it can, relying primarily on the good sense and judgment of trial judges and on the formal voir dire conducted by the trial judge with counsel participating to a limited extent in their traditional adversarial roles. See Rosales-Lopez v. United States, 451 U.S. 182, 101 S.Ct. 1629, 68 L.Ed.2d 22 (1981). The voir dire of course occurs before any evidence is adduced, and its goal, so far as insuring impartiality is concerned, is, by definition, only to ferret out partiality or bias already in place and uninfluenced by what is yet to come in the course of trial.
Basically, once voir dire is completed, inquiry into ingoing, bias or partiality ceases; the jury is formally composed; and the working assumption is made — as it must be — that, as then composed, the jury empanelled is at least a tolerably impartial body. No one supposes that individual jurors then retain throughout a trial the same level of “impartiality” with which it is assumed, by virtue of their having survived the voir dire process, they entered it. Undoubtedly, depending upon the case and a variety of individual psychological and emotional and cognitive factors, their “impartiality” as to the matter in issue may wax and wane widely from start to finish, and their final vote in the jury room obviously reflects a view that is decidedly not “impartial.”
This is all perfectly obvious, and I run through it only to point up the extreme delicacy — unlike that presented by arguably bias-revealing answers on voir dire —of the problem presented to the trial judge in this case. What was being suggested to him was not impartiality from extraneous sources that drew in question this juror’s qualification to sit on the body originally empanelled. The suggestion here was that on the evidence so far adduced, and particularly because of one item, any impartiality that originally existed had at this point been significantly destroyed. The suggestion was not that an ingoing bias formed independently of the evidence had not been revealed on voir dire and still persisted, cf. Greenwood (failure to respond to voir dire question that may have revealed disqualification for bias), but that “impartiality” had been created by the evidence adduced. The judge accordingly was entitled to take into account that what was being reported was not in fact “partiality” of the kind sought to be identified as disqualifying on voir dire, but simply the juror’s present state of mind in assessing the probative force of the evidence. He was also entitled to take into account that a poll of all of the individual jurors at that (or any other) time during this or any trial would probably reveal a wide range of similar feelings of “partiali*1070ty” or “bias” related solely to the flow of evidence.
I have no doubt that some mid-trial revelations of newly-acquired, evidence-induced “bias” by a juror could justify, or in some cases compel, removal of the juror and either substitution or mistrial. But I think this could only be so if the revelation compelled the conclusion that the juror’s trial-induced bias had so manifestly deprived him of the capacity further to weigh the evidence — both that already received and that yet to come — that the juror was now irretrievably “partial” in the originally disqualifying sense.
Of necessity, assessments of a juror’s state of mind and emotional condition as it relates to his “impartiality” must be left largely to the trial judges. I think the trial judge’s latitude, his range of discretion in assessing the significance of trial-induced “bias” must be even wider than the great width accorded his assessments of bias from extraneous sources. The Supreme Court has recently admonished that “an appellate court cannot easily second-guess the conclusions of the [voir dire judge].” Rosales-Lopez, 451 U.S. at 188, 101 S.Ct. at 1634. I think we must be even more deferential to trial judge’s assessments of the disqualifying effects of evidence-induced juror “bias” as revealed during trial.
Here, according that wide deference, I would not find discretion abused. The jur- or’s response was concededly ambiguous as to whether his mind remained open. But the court was entitled to take into account that all the evidence was not yet in, and that jury deliberations would be conducted under instructions that would again remind of the juror’s obligations and the defendants’ rights. Further, and critically for me, I think the judge was entitled to take into account the possible adverse effect on the administration of jury trials of creating a practical precedent for excusing jurors in mid-trial because of revelations of emotional distress induced by particular evidence. This undoubtedly occurs in many trials and the judge could rightly be concerned not to encourage juror conduct of this kind.
In sum, I would hold that the judge did not abuse his discretion in making the judgment that, all things considered — the jur- or’s responses, his demeanor, the ongoing nature of the proceedings, the possibly adverse precedential consequences — the juror should not be found disqualified and mistrial ordered.