Jury pamphlet may threaten conviction
Baier was found guilty of killing her boyfriend
Jurors who rejected a “battered woman” defense in a domestic homicide trial may wind up back in court to answer questions about whether pamphlets found in the jury room influenced deliberations.
The answers could lead to a new trial. Brittany Baier, 29, fatally shot her longtime boyfriend, Terrance J. Tucker, 27, on Dec. 20, 2016, at the couple’s West Allis home.
At her trial in October, an expert testified that based on eight hours of inter-
views, plus several psychological tests, he felt Baier met the definition of a battered woman. He told jurors victims often feel embarrassed to be in such relationships, don’t tell friends and family and can react violently when they finally reach a point where they feel their life is threatened and there’s no other out.
Baier testified that she fired in desperation after hours of physical and emotional abuse, at gunpoint, prompted by an argument over her accidentally ruining some of the couple’s marijuana plants.
But Baier didn’t call the police. She tried to clean the crime scene and move Tucker’s body, reported him missing, then claimed an intruder had killed him and beaten her before finally admitting to the crime.
In October, a jury deliberated for several hours over two days before rejecting Baier’s self-defense argument and finding her guilty of first-degree intentional homicide.
The next day, a clerk found copies of a brochure entitled “Behind Closed Doors: A Guide for Jury Deliberations” in the jury room and notified the lawyers.
A defense investigator found eight of the jurors, seven of whom remembered the document, and two remembered reading it.
In a motion for new trial, Baier’s attorney, Travis Schwantes, argued that the pamphlet — which was not issued by the judge or the clerk’s office — amounts to extraneous information that may have muddled the jurors’ understanding of the law.
“At first glance, the document appears innocuous” and merely encouraging jurors to respect each other and get along, Schwantes wrote of the fact that prosecutors had the burden of disproving Baier’s self-defense claim beyond a reasonable doubt.
“By stark contrast,” the motion claims, the guide tells jurors to see if each element (of the crime) has been established by the evidence, leaving open the possibility the jurors thought Baier had the burden to prove her own self-defense.
In response to the motion, Assistant District Attorney Michael Lonski argued that the innocuous pamphlet does not amount to the kind of extraneous information banned from jury deliberations. Even if it was, he argued, the pamphlet content is not prejudicial.
Lonski notes that the pamphlet says in bold print, “This guide is not intended to take the place of any instructions given you by the judge,” which did specify that it was the state’s burden to disprove self-defense.
After a hearing Dec. 1, Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Mark Sanders did not grant the motion outright but he did cancel Baier’s Dec. 22 sentencing date.
He also set a hearing in January, likely to include jurors as witnesses, to find out more about how the pamphlets got to the jury room and what effect they might have had on the final verdicts.
The two-page Guide for Jury Deliberations is on the Wisconsin Courts website, a version tailored with the permission of the American Judicature Society, which developed the original version.
It consists of a short introduction and a series of questions and answers bolstered with several suggestions about how to proceed.