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Judge to Jurors: Don't Mess With Me!
We wrote earlier this week about the juror who wrote to a judge expressing concern that a potential criminal sentence would undermine the jury's acquittal. ("Juror to Judge: What Was the Point?") At her blog Deliberations, Anne Reed picked up on this same story as an illustration of the level of respect we give jurors. She pointed also to another remarkable story (via Legal Profession Blog) about the censure of a Kansas judge for yelling at jurors during voir dire.
It started, Reed recounts, when a potential juror in a murder trial said she would not believe police witnesses. Judge Rebecca Pilshaw dismissed her but ordered her to sit through the trial in any event, as a lesson. The judge then turned to the other jurors in the room and said, "Anybody else want to mess with me?" As Reed writes, "I don't imagine anyone did." But soon after, at least one juror who initially indicated a problem with police witnesses decided he'd changed his mind. Eventually, Judge Pilshaw apologized -- and apologized and apologized -- explaining at one point, "So if I have misled any of you into thinking that I am some angry shrew up here, I am not. I really and truly am not."
None of this led the Kansas Supreme Court to conclude the defendant deserved a new trial. But it did find the shrew needed taming and ordered that the judge be given a public censure.
Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on July 2, 2008 at 02:06 PM | Permalink
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