Court Opinion

ID: 9744140
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 21:54:37.911134+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:46.955123
License: Public Domain

MR. JUSTICE CLARK, dissenting: I believe the majority is seriously mistaken; and I believe the dissent in the appellate court (63 Ill. App. 3d 575, 584) is correct. Given People v. Faulisi (1966), 34 Ill. 2d 187, and People v. Kirkpatrick (1953), 413 Ill. 595, I do not see how the majority could declare “it will not be presumed that an entire jury venire is prejudiced against a defendant solely because the defendant’s and a codefendant’s venires overlapped.” (77 Ill. 2d at 237.) The majority attempts to distinguish the instant case from Faulisi and Kirkpatrick on the basis that in each of those cases the same venire or pool provided the jurors for the separate trials of defendant and codefendant, whereas here the overlapping venire was only part of the much larger pool from which defendant’s jury was selected. Faulisi and Kirkpatrick do not suggest that had there been a partial overlapping of jury venires or pools, the problem of a biased and partial jury would have been cured. Those cases demonstrate that it is the danger of prejudice which requires reversal. It is difficult to show actual prejudice. The possibility of prejudice was acutely heightened by the trial court’s failure to excuse juror Leslie Hunt for cause as soon as her “conflict of interest” was revealed to the court. The fact that she was excused prior to the jury’s deliberation, but after the evidence had been presented, only marginally lessened the prejudice and error. Mrs. Hunt’s relationship to the deceased victim — wife of the victim’s nephew — makes irrelevant her apparently sincerely held belief that she could be objective. Whether her family urged her to remove herself or urged her to “convict” the defendant, she had a conflict of interest which was more than potential. The defendant contends, reasonably I think, that the “special treatment” of Mrs. Hunt — she was singled out for questioning and sequestered separately from, and excused without explanation to, the other jurors — may have prejudiced the other members of the jury. The majority rejects this as speculative. Although it is true that the party challenging a juror or jurors for cause bears the burden of showing that the juror has or jurors have a disqualifying state or states of mind (see People v. Cole (1973), 54 Ill. 2d 401, 413), this would be difficult to prove in the circumstances here. Yet the circumstances here are such that they demonstrate prejudice per se. The defendant should not have to prove actual prejudice or a disqualifying state of mind, perhaps an impossibility, where the juror’s relationship was so palpably a conflict. Mrs. Hunt’s relationship to the victim was not “a merely formal position” as in People v. Ward (1965), 32 Ill. 2d 253, 259, but a personal one, a relationship which resulted in pressure from her family and in-laws, as she admitted. For these reasons, I would reverse the appellate and circuit courts. MR. JUSTICE MORAN joins in this dissent.