Court Opinion

ID: 9589398
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:44:04.395344+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:21:08.057137
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
Appellant seeks a rehearing on the issue of the illegality of the verdict which was accepted and published after half the jury read a newspaper article reciting false and prejudicial evidence of appellant’s guilt.
The circumstances of this case are unique and troublesome. They present an analytical riddle difficult to unravel. But at every turn of the maze and with constant concern for the rights of the appellant to a fair, uninfected verdict we met the same wall: the jury reached a decision and offered a verdict of guilty to Count 1 of the indictment before any of them read the prejudicial newspaper article. The trial court was legally empowered to accept that decision as the verdict when it was offered, and was as empowered to accept it the next morning without permitting further deliberation by the jury as to appellant’s guilt.
No one can doubt that if the jury had offered an acquittal as its verdict, and then read a prejudicial article reciting false evidence of appellant’s guilt, the trial judge should the next morning be required to accept the verdict of acquittal instanter. If he granted a mistrial, it would be error, so far as to suggest the appellant had no right to his *677uninfected verdict of acquittal. The same logic must apply when the jury offered as the verdict its uninfected determination of guilt, for the object of justice, which is to seek the truth, is as available to the state as well as to the criminal defendant.
While in a criminal trial the state has all the burdens, and the defendant has most of the rights, he does not have the right to speculate, as a legal presumption, that although the jury had already heard the evidence and offered its uninfected verdict of guilty as to one count, which the court had no power to reject, the jury might have changed its mind as to that count while deliberating on another count if the prejudicial article had not been read by half the jury. That hypothetical proposition, which is so highly speculative as to be nearly fantasy, is the essence of the appellant’s theory in this case, and it does not bear the weight of analysis.

Motion for rehearing denied.