POST ON COURTS
Juror’s report rattles pill case Prospective panelist says other candidate Googled info on doctor.
Allegations that a prospective juror Googled the name of a doctor charged in a patient’s overdose death temporarily shook up the end of jury selection Friday for a murder trial expected to begin next week featuring a look into part of Jeff and Chris George’s $40 million pill mill empire.
Gerald Klein, 81, is the former surgeon standing trial on first-degree murder, drug trafficking and other charges in the case tied to the February 2009 death of Joseph Bartolucci.
Bartolucci was a patient of Klein’s at the East Coast Pain Clinic on Okeechobee Boulevard in West Palm Beach when he overdosed on hydromorphone.
Jury selection in what is expected to be a three-week trial began Monday and ended Friday afternoon.
Three hours before attorneys made their final selections, however, Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Karen Miller informed Assistant State
Attorneys Barbara Burns and Michael Rachel and defense attorneys Sam Rabin and Michael Mann that one of the prospective jurors told the bailiffff about a conversation she’d overheard between other jurors.
The juror, who works as a judicial assistant, said she heard a female prospective juror telling two or three other jurors Monday that she’d done a Google search on Klein’s case.
The juror who reported the incident couldn’t identify the woman who researched the case nor the other people in the conversation.
And though she said the woman was telling the others what she’d read, she couldn’t hear any details.
“I was just walking by,” the reporting juror told Miller.
Miller allowed both prosecutors and Klein’s attorneys to take a break and fifigure out what to do next, but told them she