Court Opinion

ID: 9570298
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:22:07.662923+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:05:36.619648
License: Public Domain

Justice Exum
dissenting.
Believing the trial court erred in denying defendant’s motion for change of venue and challenges for cause of jurors Thompson, Butler and McRainey, I dissent.
My disagreement with the majority stems from my belief that the extensive and prejudicial publicity involved in this case renders it manifestly impossible for us to say that defendant received a fair trial. I find both the prejudicial nature of the publicity and its magnitude significant. I also believe the denial of the challenges for cause clearly violated our statute on the subject. N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-1212(6) (1978).
Without stating the articles’ contents, the majority blithely concludes on the change of venue issue, “We have examined carefully the newspaper clippings defendant has alleged were so inflammatory as to prevent him from receiving a fair and impartial trial. We find them not to be inflammatory and hold that they did not. impede defendant from receiving a fair and impartial trial.” The newspaper articles complained of are, indeed, in*404flammatory. Furthermore, they had been read by enough of the prospective jurors that, even after defendant exhausted his peremptory challenges, eight of the twelve jurors who tried him had been exposed to the publicity.
The newspaper articles did not merely report the fact that defendant was charged in these crimes. Defendant has brought forward, either in the record on appeal or as separate exhibits, fourteen articles concerning the defendant Corbett. These articles appeared in local papers having large general circulations in Alamance County from 11 July 1981 through 3 December 1981, just four days before the instant trial began. Among other things, many articles flaunt defendant’s prior acquittal of a similar offense some six months before this trial. A follow-up article criticizes the jury’s performance in that case, citing the prosecutor’s “surprise” with the verdict and an admission by one of the jurors that the jury had made a mistake.
The 11 July 1981 article is headlined “Not Guilty is Verdict in Rape, Kidnap Trial.” The article reports that Corbett was acquitted on charges of kidnapping and raping a seventeen-year-old Altamahaw woman on a northern Alamance County road during the early morning hours. On 19 November 1981, less than a month before defendant’s trial, the most prominent article on the front page of The Alamance News was headlined, “Are Jurors What is Wrong with the Courts?” This article contains a lengthy account of Corbett’s earlier acquittal on the unrelated kidnapping and rape charges, The article quotes the Assistant District Attorney, William Johnson, who prosecuted defendant in the instant cases, as saying that he was surprised the jury found Corbett not guilty in July. “Let’s just say I was astonished,” he said. “I expect that if I talked to some of those people [the jurors] it wouldn’t have been a nice conversation.” Johnson continued: “My main feeling is that it’s probably a situation where the jury felt that the prosecuting witness didn’t make a credible witness,” adding that a polygraph test proved the truth of the victim’s testimony but that this evidence was not admissible. The lead paragraphs of this article read:
Are jurors what is wrong in the court system?
This is a common question voiced by many persons in view of trials which result in the acquittal of a defendant and *405his being set free in light of substantial evidence indicating his or her guilt.
On 3 December 1981 another featured article in The Alamance News appeared, headlined “Jurors Defend ‘Not Guilty’ Corbett Verdict.” Prominent in this article were the names and addresses of the jurors who had earlier acquitted Corbett. The article made clear that the newspaper had tried to reach all twelve jurors to get their versions of the not guilty verdict. The jurors were quoted extensively in the article as they attempted to defend their verdict for the newspaper.
Of the eight articles which appeared in September and October 1981 (the latest on 27 October 1981) and dealt with the present charges against defendant, all except one prominently mentioned defendant’s earlier acquittal in an unrelated rape and kidnapping case. Typical of the references in these articles is one contained in the 27 October 1981 edition of The Burlington Daily Times-News. This article dealt essentially with Corbett’s assertion that he was suffering from “Vietnam Veterans’ Syndrome” and was moving for psychiatric evaluation to determine his competency to stand trial. The article said:
Monday’s motion apparently marks the first time Corbett has claimed a mental illness after being charged with a serious crime. In 1979, he was tried on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon, and was found innocent. Earlier this year, he was tried on charges of aggravated kidnapping and second degree rape, with the trial ending in a deadlock.
In a second trial he was found innocent. In each of the three trials, neither Corbett nor his attorney made mention of any mental problems, court records show.
Of greater concern to me is the newspaper article appearing on 19 November 1981 shortly before defendant’s trial on the present charges, criticizing the jury system and, in particular, the jury which had acquitted Corbett of similar charges in July. This article was then followed by one in which the jurors in the earlier Corbett case were called upon individually to defend their verdict, their names and addresses being prominently published. Because of the nature and timing of these articles in The Alamance News, it appears the paper might indeed have wanted to intimidate the jurors in defendant’s upcoming trial into returning a guilty verdict.
*406An important factor in analyzing the need for a change of venue is, of course, the extent to which the pretrial publicity has infected the venire. Irvin v. Dowd, 366 U.S. 717 (1961); State v. Jerrett, 309 N.C. 239 (1983). During the jury selection procedure, ten of the first twelve jurors called into the box indicated that they had read about the Corbett case in the local newspapers. The state elected to keep all of these jurors on the panel, excusing only one of the two jurors who had not read the articles. The excused juror’s replacement, Mr. Little, said he had been following the case pretty closely in the newspapers and that, based on what he had read about it, the defendant was “guilty as far as I’m concerned.” After Mr. Little indicated that he could give the defendant a fair trial “if they put a pretty good case for him,” the state accepted him and passed the jury to defendant. Of the jurors passed to defendant, McRainey, Thompson, and Butler said they had formed an opinion on the question of defendant’s guilt from news accounts which they had read. Juror Williams indicated she had read all of the newspaper articles and, when asked whether she had formed an opinion as to Corbett’s guilt, replied, “Yeah, I probably thought he was.” Other jurors indicated that while they had read one or more of the articles about Corbett, they had formed no opinion regarding his guilt.
After defendant completed his challenges, six replacement jurors were tendered to the state. Of these, four had read newspaper articles about the case. One said, “I’ve heard a lot of comment about it. I’ve seen it on the TV and heard it on the radio and read it in the paper.” Of the twelve jurors who actually sat and determined these charges against defendant, eight of them had read one or more of the news articles appearing about the case. Defendant exhausted his peremptory challenges and sought unsuccessfully to challenge two additional jurors.
Thus, not only was much of the pretrial publicity inflammatory and intimidating to prospective jurors (particularly the articles appearing within several weeks of defendant’s trial), but this pretrial publicity also permeated the jury box. A majority of the jury had been exposed to this adverse pretrial publicity. Defendant was unable, through the exercise of his peremptory challenges, to select a jury none of whom had been exposed to the publicity. We held in State v. Jerrett, 309 N.C. 239 (1983) that, under similar circumstances, it was error warranting a new trial *407not to allow defendant’s motion for a change of venue. While the county involved in Jerrett, Alleghany, was smaller and generally more rural than Alamance, the difference was not so substantial that Alamance can be characterized as a “large urban area.” See Jerrett, 309 N.C. at 257, 307 S.E. 2d at 348. Even if the nature of the two counties is somewhat different, the publicity in Jerrett was generated largely by word-of-mouth. Here, it was by newspapers, generally circulated throughout the county, and local television and radio broadcasts. Likely, the dissemination of this information reached more people than did the oral statements in Jerrett. The most important circumstances common to both cases is that the pretrial publicity was strongly inimical to a fair trial and this publicity had permeated the jury box.
Further, in Jerrett, as here, the jurors were examined on voir dire collectively so that all prospective jurors heard the damaging responses made by other prospective jurors. In Jerrett, we stressed this collective voir dire as an important circumstance to be considered on the change of venue question. We concluded that because Alleghany County was “infected with prejudice against” the defendant and the jury voir dire revealed that the prejudice had permeated the jury box, defendant “fulfilled his burden of showing that a reasonable likelihood existed that he would not receive a fair trial before an Alleghany County jury.” Jerrett, 309 N.C. at 258, 307 S.E. 2d at 349.
I think we should conclude here that prejudicial and intimidating pretrial publicity had been circulated throughout the county and the jury voir dire demonstrated that it permeated the jury box. Therefore defendant has shown a reasonable likelihood that he could not receive a fair trial before an Alamance County jury in December 1981. To deny defendant a change of venue was error.
Jurors McRainey, Butler and Thompson said their exposure to pretrial publicity caused them to form an opinion about defendant’s guilt. It was error, therefore, not to sustain defendant’s challenges for cause to these jurors. N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-1212(6) (1978). The majority reasons that since each of these jurors ultimately stated that they would not let their previously formed opinions intrude on their consideration of the case, the trial judge *408properly denied the challenges for cause. The majority relies on the statement from Irvin v. Dowd, 366 U.S. 717, 723 (1961), that if a juror “can lay aside his impression or opinion and render a verdict based on the evidence presented in court,” defendant has not been denied a fair trial on the basis that the juror had previously formed an opinion.
Irvin was a habeas corpus proceeding challenging Irvin’s state court conviction of murder and death sentence. The question was whether Irvin’s conviction violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court held that the Due Process Clause did not require that jurors be totally ignorant of the case nor that they had never formed any preconceived notion as to the accused’s guilt. It only required that the juror be able to lay aside such notions. The Court went on to say that “the adoption of such a rule . . . ‘cannot foreclose inquiry as to whether, in a given case, the application of that rule works a deprivation of the prisoner’s life or liberty without due process of law.’ ” The Court then concluded that the extensive pretrial publicity for six or seven months preceding Irvin’s trial coupled with the difficulty of obtaining jurors who had no preconceived notions about Irvin’s guilt (eight out of the twelve jurors who ultimately sat had once formed an opinion that Irvin was guilty) resulted in a denial of due process in Irvin’s case.
Rather than supporting the majority’s position, the holding in Irvin is some authority for giving defendant a new trial on due process grounds. At best Irvin has no application to the challenge for cause issue. It is a due process case.
Defendant’s contention here is the trial judge’s denial of his challenges for cause to jurors Thompson, Butler and McRainey, violated our statute, N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-1212, because each of these jurors had formed an opinion as to defendant’s guilt. The statute provides:
A challenge for cause to an individual juror may be made by any party on the ground that the juror:
(6) Has formed or expressed an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the defendant. It is improper for a party *409to elicit whether the opinion formed is favorable or adverse to the defendant.
The statute does not permit denial of a challenge for cause of a juror who has once formed an opinion on the ground that the juror says at trial that he or she can lay it aside. The statute is clear, unambiguous, and not susceptible to interpretation on this point. It says, without equivocation, that a juror who has either “formed or expressed an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the defendant” is subject to a challenge for cause. When the court finds no error in the denial of challenges for cause if the jurors can lay aside their opinions, it usurps the legislative function by rewriting the statute. Jurors Thompson, Butler and McRainey each admitted that they had formed an opinion about defendant’s guilt. Defendant’s challenge for cause to these jurors should have been allowed.
Defendant then challenged each of these jurors peremptorily. He exhausted the peremptory challenges available to him. He renewed his challenges for cause after he had peremptorily challenged the three jurors in question and the renewed challenges were denied. The improper denials, therefore, of defendant’s challenges for cause of these three jurors warrants a new trial. N.C. Gen. Stat. § 15A-1214(h) & (i).
Evidence of defendant’s guilt is strong. Despite what this Court may believe about his guilt, it has an obligation to afford him a fair trial before an impartial jury. Specifically, we are obligated as regards his trial, to protect him, if we can, from the clamor of an irate newspaper bent on seeing him convicted. The Court fails to meet these obligations when, under the circumstances here, it finds no error in the denial of defendant’s change of venue motion and his challenges for cause of those jurors who before his trial had formed an opinion about his guilt.