Legal News

D?Oh! ?Bailiff?s Dozen? Gets Murder Defendant a New Trial

By Ashby Jones

We’ve heard about trials having to be suspended for a lack of jurors. Never before, however, have we heard of courtroom trouble involving too many fact-finders.

But that strange problem seems to have befallen a jury down in Harris County, Texas. A jury on Tuesday returned a guilty verdict after deliberating for 45 minutes in a murder case. But there was a problem: The judge soon noticed that there were 13 people sitting in the jury box instead of the regular 12. Here’s the story, from the Houston Chronicle.

It seems that judge Mark Kent Ellis (pictured) didn’t have much of a choice: He declared a mistrial. Ellis said a criminal jury must have 12 people on it and can’t have any outside influences. He said the 13th juror would be considered an outside influence, despite the fact that she sat through all of the testimony. So, instead of getting prison time for shooting his girlfriend, the defendant would get another bite at the apple.

“In 23 years I’ve never seen anything like this,” the judge said. “The jurors all seemed pretty upset, but there’s no way to unring that bell.”

So how does something like this happen? We’re not really sure. But Ellis threw the book at a substitute bailiff, though it’s unclear exactly what the bailiff did wrong. “I told him I never want to see him in my courtroom again,” Ellis said.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 12, 2009 (boomark / email).