Ruling on racial bias set:
A Supreme Court appeal from a Hispanic defendant in Colorado raises the prospect that a juror’s comments during deliberations can be so offensive that they deprive a defendant of a fair trial.
The justices could say as early as Monday whether they will take up a case in the fall involving competing tenets of the US legal system: a defendant’s constitutional right to trial by an impartial jury, and the need for secrecy in jury deliberations.
After a jury convicted Miguel Angel Pena Rodriguez of attempted sexual assault involving teenage sisters at a Denverarea horse race track, two jurors provided his lawyer with sworn statements claiming that a third juror made derogatory remarks about Mexican men before voting guilty.
“I think he did it because he’s Mexican and Mexican men take whatever they want,” is one of several racially tinged statements attributed to the juror identified in court records by the initials H.C. In another comment, the juror is said to have cast doubt on an alibi provided by a Hispanic witness for Pena Rodriguez because the witness was “an illegal.” The witness testified that he was in the country legally.
But three separate courts in Colorado said those statements could not be used to upend Pena Rodriguez’s conviction because of a long-standing rule that prohibits jurors from testifying about what happens during deliberations. The rule, found in both federal and state law, is intended to promote the finality of verdicts and to shield jurors from outside influences.
The Supreme Court also has been unwilling to intrude on deliberations.
In a 5-4 ruling in 1987, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion that rejected calls for a hearing to explore allegations made by jurors of drug and alcohol use by jurors during a criminal fraud trial.
“There is little doubt that post-verdict investigation into juror misconduct would in some instances lead to the invalidation of verdicts reached after irresponsible or improper juror behavior. It is not at all clear, however, that the jury system could survive such efforts to perfect it,” O’Connor wrote.
In dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall said the right to an impartial jury was more important. “If, as is charged, members of petitioners’ jury were intoxicated as a result of their use of drugs and alcohol to the point of sleeping through material portions of the trial, the verdict in this case must be set aside,” he wrote. (AP)
Dad charged for killing son:
A Los Angeles man charged with fatally shooting his 29-year-old son for being gay had repeatedly threatened to kill him over his sexual orientation, prosecutors say.
Amir Issa, 29, was found shot to death just outside the family home on Tuesday. While the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office charged father Shehada Issa, 69, on Friday with murder as a hate crime in the son’s death, investigators on Saturday still were trying to determine responsibility for a second killing at the home discovered by police at the same time, that of Amir’s mother, police spokesman Officer Mike Lopez said.
The mother, 68-year-old Rabihah Issa, had been stabbed repeatedly, coroner’s Lt David Smith said.
Shehada Issa told police he shot his son Amir in self-defense after he discovered his wife’s body in their house.
Prosecutors gave a different motive for the son’s killing, however. “The murder was committed because of the victim’s sexual orientation and because of the defendant’s perception of that status and the victims’ association with a person and a group of that status,” prosecutors said in a statement.
They did not elaborate. Police had no details Saturday on any of the alleged threats the father had made against his gay son.