Court Opinion

ID: 9771682
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 16:51:10.170279+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:31:35.431677
License: Public Domain

LEIBSON, Justice,
dissenting.
Respectfully, I dissent.
We have avoided confronting the compelling evidence that this jury was necessarily biased because of the incriminating evidence presented at the prior trial of the appellant’s confederate, by asserting that the appellant failed to seek relief by an appropriate method. The essence of the Majority Opinion is that when this appellant’s motion for a continuance was overruled, he erred fatally in failing to then attempt to challenge for cause the jurors tainted by the evidence against him from the prior trial. We state:
“Here, since the appellant did not challenge any of the jurors, we can only assume that he was satisfied with the jury.”
Such an assumption is mistaken.
*527The facts are that twenty-one of the twenty-five jurors drawn in the confederate’s case were seated as potential jurors in the appellant’s case. Ten of those jurors responded on voir dire that they had previous knowledge of the appellant’s case from the trial of the confederate’s case. Four of the jurors who convicted the confederate were seated as jurors in the appellant’s case. Prior to trial the appellant moved for a continuance arguing that he was entitled to be tried by a separate jury panel because the jury panel would be severely prejudiced against him since nearly all of the prospective jurors had already heard unrebutted evidence of his activities during the prior trial. To deny this motion was an abuse of discretion. A short continuance until the next jury was impaneled was in order, and failure to grant this continuance should be viewed as intolerable. The presenting situation is of a defendant who has been denied the right to be tried by an impartial and unbiased jury, a right guaranteed by both the Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution and by Section 11 of the Kentucky Constitution.
Further challenge to the tainted jurors during the voir dire procedure would have been an exercise in futility because the judge “cleansed” the tainted jurors by extracting from them affirmative answers to the “magic question.” He asked, could they put aside their previous knowledge and decide this case solely on the basis of the evidence presented at this trial. To expect them to put aside their previous knowledge, is to deny human nature. Opinion once formed can hardly be entirely erased, regardless of a conscientious effort they might undertake to do so.
Montgomery v. Commonwealth, Ky., 819 S.W.2d 713 (1991), wherein we applied the principle of implied bias in a similar situation, is distinguished in the Majority Opinion “on its facts because Montgomery dealt with the trial judge’s failure to grant a defendant’s challenge of a juror for cause,” rather than because of failure to grant a continuance. It is, quite obviously, a distinction without a difference.
The Commonwealth’s principal argument was:
"... any evidence concerning appellant heard at [the confederate’s] trial by these jurors was merely cumulative to the evidence adduced at appellant’s trial. The four jurors heard nothing concerning appellant at the [confederate’s] trial that was not also stated at appellant’s trial.” This is a shocking notion of a fair trial.
My colleagues should reject it out of hand.
COMBS and LAMBERT, JJ., join this dissent.