Do jurors have right to anonymity?

Recent Palm Beach County incident rekindles debate over open courts

Serving on a jury can be a bother because you have to give up your time. But should you also have to give up your privacy?

Should your name wind up in the hands of a murder trial defendant with possibly sinister motives?

Florida says yes, favoring open courts rather than anonymous jurors.

Yet when a Palm Beach County felon recently spelled out the names of his jury in a jailhouse call and suggested they needed to “pray,” it set off a panic.

The judge tried to assure the six jurors after their guilty verdict that “nothing bad is going to happen or has happened.”

He also called the episode “unsettling” and suggested something needs to change to prevent a repeat with another jury.

“Jurors’ identifications are public record, and this is the thing we struggle with [in] the Legislature, trying to give more anonymity to our jurors to avoid this exact thing,” Circuit Judge Jeffrey Colbath explained to the four men and two women.

But even if there had been a law in place to stop juror names from going public, it would not have prevented this alarm because defendant Tavaress Wilson had full access to the names from jury selection. So the only real safeguard likely would have been a rare move to keep juror IDs from the lawyers, too.

After hearing what happened, the Wilson jurors met privately with a sheriff ’s investigator at the judge’s behest and were escorted to their cars. They could not be reached for comment despite attempts by phone in the days following the verdict.

While judges can keep juror identities a secret from the public in certain cases, it’s been more than two decades since Florida lawmakers debated a bill to keep juror names private in all criminal courts.

The 1996 measure, called the “Safety and Privacy for Jurors Act,” didn’t muster enough support and hasn’t been revisited since.

Advocates for open government say such legislation goes overboard because threats on jurors or attempts to influence trial outcomes are extremely uncommon.

“It was very frightening that we would close access to this information that is so critically important to this whole notion of an open judicial process,” said Barbara Petersen, a lawyer who as president of the First Amendment Foundation argues that there must be a compelling purpose for sealing records.

But Judge Colbath told the South Florida Sun Sentinel it’s time again to study whether there are ways to balance public and media access with protecting juror privacy.

“Build a roof while the sun’s shining,” he explained. “I don’t want to wait until something spectacularly bad happens.”

And sometimes the threat isn’t coming from the person on trial.

One of the events that spurred the mid-1990s legislation was when a victim in a kidnapping, robbery and assault case was upset by a not guilty verdict and wrote angry letters to the jurors.

After the 2011 Casey Anthony murder trial ended in an acquittal, some people held signs outside the Orange County Courthouse that read, “Juror 1–12 Guilty of Murder!!!” and “Somewhere a Village is Missing 12 Idiots.”

Before the trial, the judge had ruled that the identities of the jurors brought in from Pinellas County would not be released for three months, citing jury safety.

After the 2013 George Zimmerman trial in the killing of teen Trayvon Martin also ended in an acquittal, there was a national outcry, including social media posts with death threats for the jurors. The Seminole County judge presiding over the trial also had ordered that the jurors could be identified only by numbers.

Proponents for keeping juror names out of the public record say it’s a layer of protection for those who have to decide the fate of people accused of serious crimes, especially in high-profile cases.

Former Democratic State Sen. Tom Rossin of West Palm Beach says his juror privacy bill was crafted to “protect jurors and their families from potential threats, harassment, and jeopardy arising from their participation in criminal trials.”

The semi-retired civil lawyer, now 84, says he still doesn’t see a good reason for releasing juror names, and he believes it can discourage people from jury service “if they think it’s dangerous because their name is out there.”

Since 2007, the federal court system has barred all juror identifying information from public case files. And some state courts also shield juror identities from the public.

In recent decades, there are examples of judges around the country who permanently or temporarily stopped reporters, attorneys and others from learning who is serving on juries:

The federal judge in a 1987 extortion trial for reputed Philadelphia mob boss Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo told jurors they had been kept anonymous “to make sure that you would not have any apprehensions about your safety or the safety of your families or anything else.” This practice has been used in other organized-crime and drug-cartel cases around the country.

In 2016, a New York federal judge said there was a “serious need to protect the jury” with anonymity for the trial of a suspected al Qaeda terrorist, charged in a deadly Afghanistan bombing and accused of threatening to kill prosecutors.

The Pennsylvania judge in the recent Bill Cosby trial expressed concerns this month about publicly identifying the names of the jurors who convicted the comedian of aggravated indecent assault charges. The judge told lawyers for media outlets the jurors wanted to be left alone and had been confronted with reporters “on their front lawns, calling them up, constantly harassing them,” according to the Associated Press.

California, Colorado and Hawaii are among states that typically keep juror identities from the public.

Yet for the most part, courts around the nation have favored the release of juror names, according to an article by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

It cited a 1990 federal appeals court ruling out of New England that found, “Knowledge of juror identities allows the public to verify the impartiality of key participants in the administration of justice, and thereby ensures fairness.”

Petersen, from the Florida’s First Amendment group, agrees there is a “compelling public interest” in having access to jurors’ names, especially when someone’s freedom is at stake in a felony case.

“Why do we want an anonymous jury?” she asks. “Why do we want to create an exception to the Constitutional right of access [to the courts] in response to the infrequent bad actions of a few people?”

At a time when personal information is easily accessible online, many jurors still tend to be surprised to learn that their service is not shrouded in secrecy. And once in a while they protest.

In 2015, a Broward murder trial was halted when several jurors raised concerns about the public — especially the defendant and his supporters — having access to their names and addresses.

It prompted the judge to declare a mistrial.

In the Palm Beach County murder trial that just ended, defense attorney Stephen Arbuzow said his client’s jailhouse call — and remark that the jurors “need to pray on it” — had been taken the wrong way.

“There is no threat, there is just the giving of the names,” he said. “It’s not uncommon in any faith, really, to pray for people without their knowledge.”

But Judge Colbath disagreed the call was benign.

“There’s a very reasonable interpretation that it was done for a threatening manner of some sort, that it was intended to reach out to the jurors in an inappropriate way, either by threat, or some sort of coercion or payment,” he said.