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12 Angry Minutes

By "Milbarge" and "Fitz-Hume"

This post at How Appealing led me to a Houston Chronicle story about the execution of Jose Medellin, whose death sentence led to quite a fuss regarding the International Court of Justice. I didn't really have anything to say about the Medellin case, but a story in the Chronicle's sidebar caught my eye.

This story is about a series of trials in an awful sex abuse case. At the end, the article notes that two co-defendants were convicted (and sentenced to life in prison) after the jury deliberated less than five minutes. Five minutes! That's some efficient work.

How short would a jury "deliberation" have to be to be unworthy of the name? Ordinarily, we don't peer into the "black box" of jury deliberations because we want jurors to speak freely and vote their consciences. To refrain from prying, we have to resort to the legal fiction that juries always follow their instructions. We have to assume, for example, that the jury didn't rely on evidence the judge told it to ignore, and that the jury didn't bring in any outside information, like news articles.

But one of the instructions is also that the jury should not deliberate until the end of the trial. In theory, the jurors' minds should not be made up until after they start deliberating, so they can hear from their fellow jurors and come to a collective decision. It probably takes almost five minutes to elect a foreperson and count the votes. The lawyers probably didn't even have time to leave the courtroom before the jury came back. The jury might as well have not left the box.

Maybe the case really was open and shut, but still, five minutes is damn fast. It would seem clear that the jurors made up their minds before they were supposed to (or they deliberated earlier than they should have). At that point, it's not like the judge could send the jurors back to twiddle their thumbs and pretend to deliberate some more. And I'm sure the prosecutor would say that the evidence was obviously so strong that any jury, no matter how long it was out, would have convicted. But at what point could a jury deliberation be so short that there has to be a remedy? And what would that remedy be -- a mistrial? a new trial? Would double jeopardy prevent a re-trial, the irony being that a defendant whose guilt is so clear the jury didn't even have to deliberate ends up not being convicted? No easy answers, except, apparently, for that jury.

Full post as published by Begging the Question on August 05, 2008 (boomark / email).