News
Criminal
Nov. 13, 2003
Court Does Not Open With 'Oyez, Oyez, Let Us Pray'
Reporter's Notebook By Peter Blumberg "If a man strikes someone with an iron object so that he dies, he is a murderer; the murderer shall be put to death."
Reporter's Notebook
By Peter Blumberg
"If a man strikes someone with an iron object so that he dies, he is a murderer; the murderer shall be put to death."
Don't look to the California Supreme Court to bless the woman who consulted her pastor and then shared a photocopy of Old Testament passages with her fellow jurors during deliberations in a 1993 capital murder trial.
Then again, it probably takes a pretty major mistake to undo a decade-old death sentence for a seven-time killer who confessed to strangling the last victim, his elderly prison cellmate, for "fun" and "excitement."
Judging from a lively, hour-long hearing last week, death row inmate Joseph Danks appeared to be at least one vote short of winning a reversal from the seven-member high court - despite a rare consensus among Danks' appellate attorney, the state's prosecutor and the justices themselves that two of his jurors committed Bible fouls.
It's a basic rule of jury duty that bringing outside information into the decision-making process is a no-no.
However, two Kern County jurors identified by the court only by their initials took it upon themselves during the penalty phase of Danks' trial to seek spiritual guidance from a higher authority while wrestling with a life-or-death decision.
As the two women later acknowledged in sworn statements, their pastors guessed that they were jurors in the highly-publicized Danks trial and referred them to passages in the Old Testament's Book of Numbers that require the execution of intentional murderers.
Juror K.A., whose pastor joked that he would vote to execute Danks if he were a juror, went a step further. The next day, she took a copy of the Biblical passages into the jury room and passed it around to the other jurors.
She later recalled that one of the jurors remarked that God plays no part in deliberations, but insisted that neither she nor anyone else made any reference to the Bible to advocate a death sentence.
Danks' attorney, Musawwir Spiegel of Davis, argued to the Supreme Court last week that the episode smacks of "egregious misconduct," not only because the jurors disobeyed the judges' orders to refrain from discussing the case with outsiders, but also because they skirted their responsibility to decide the case themselves.
Deputy Attorney General Lloyd Carter, representing the state, observed that both jurors had already been leaning toward a death sentence for Danks and urged the court to view their behavior as a minor transgression.
"I think that what these two women did, although unfortunate, was perfectly understandable in the context of deciding a death penalty case," he said.
The crux issue for the court is whether the two jurors prejudiced the outcome of the trial.
In 1992, the court confronted a similar situation in which one juror brought a Bible into the jury room and read aloud passages commanding that murderers receive the death penalty.
In that case, a bailiff discovered the Bible. The trial judge then gave a strongly worded warning to the jurors to not consult outside books and to reach a decision based only on the evidence and the law. The high court found that was an adequate cure to the juror's misconduct and affirmed the death sentence. People v. Mincey, 2 Cal.4th 408.
In the current case, the actions of K.A. and B.P. were not discovered until after trial, at which point Superior Court Judge Richard Oberholzer refused to order a retrial.
"The court finds it difficult to reason that visiting a church or a synagogue or reading a prayer book or a Bible is anything less than a human act," he said.
Nonetheless, the court has adopted a zero tolerance policy for prosecutors quoting the Bible during closing arguments.
In 1998, the court overturned a capital conviction, in part because the prosecutor attempted to persuade the jury that the biblical maxim, "Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord," should not be interpreted as trumping "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
"We cannot emphasize too strongly that to ask the jury to consider biblical teachings when deliberating is patent misconduct," Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar wrote for a unanimous court in People v. Hill, 17 Cal.4th 800.
During last Wednesday's argument, however, Werdegar did not sound as disapproving of what the Danks jurors did.
"I don't read the record as saying they were seeking guidance on the appropriateness of the death penalty, but spiritual comfort in reaching this big decision," she said, adding later: "I think this is misconduct, but the real issue is what do we do?"
Danks picked up some sympathy from Justice Joyce L. Kennard, Carlos R. Moreno and Chief Justice Ronald George.
"Do you consider it significant that we have not only one juror, K.A., who was stressed?" Kennard asked Spiegel. "We have two jurors who, without consulting each other, each consult pastors who say it's OK to kill according to the Bible."
But Justices Ming W. Chin, Janice Rogers Brown and Marvin Baxter each suggested that the trial might not have turned out any differently if the two jurors had refrained from consulting their pastors.
Chin said it sounded from the jurors' post-trial declarations as if they had already made up their minds before going to church. Brown said, "The fact that someone knows the Bible talks about capital punishment doesn't tell you that person is biased."
Commenting on juror K.A., Brown added: "What if she memorized passages or found them on her own?"
Baxter was perhaps the most blunt of the bunch. He said the court couldn't resolve the issue without taking into account that Danks killed seven people.
"I don't see how you can make this decision without considering everything," he said. "I would suggest that juror misconduct, sometimes innocent and in the best of intentions, occurs quite often. That doesn't mean every time it's discovered that a reversal of the judgment of conviction or death must follow."
Court Does Not Open With 'Oyez, Oyez, Let Us Pray'
By Peter Blumberg
"If a man strikes someone with an iron object so that he dies, he is a murderer; the murderer shall be put to death."
- Numbers 35:16
Don't look to the California Supreme Court to bless the woman who consulted her pastor and then shared a photocopy of Old Testament passages with her fellow jurors during deliberations in a 1993 capital murder trial.
Then again, it probably takes a pretty major mistake to undo a decade-old death sentence for a seven-time killer who confessed to strangling the last victim, his elderly prison cellmate, for "fun" and "excitement."
Judging from a lively, hour-long hearing last week, death row inmate Joseph Danks appeared to be at least one vote short of winning a reversal from the seven-member high court - despite a rare consensus among Danks' appellate attorney, the state's prosecutor and the justices themselves that two of his jurors committed Bible fouls.
It's a basic rule of jury duty that bringing outside information into the decision-making process is a no-no.
However, two Kern County jurors identified by the court only by their initials took it upon themselves during the penalty phase of Danks' trial to seek spiritual guidance from a higher authority while wrestling with a life-or-death decision.
As the two women later acknowledged in sworn statements, their pastors guessed that they were jurors in the highly-publicized Danks trial and referred them to passages in the Old Testament's Book of Numbers that require the execution of intentional murderers.
Juror K.A., whose pastor joked that he would vote to execute Danks if he were a juror, went a step further. The next day, she took a copy of the Biblical passages into the jury room and passed it around to the other jurors.
She later recalled that one of the jurors remarked that God plays no part in deliberations, but insisted that neither she nor anyone else made any reference to the Bible to advocate a death sentence.
Danks' attorney, Musawwir Spiegel of Davis, argued to the Supreme Court last week that the episode smacks of "egregious misconduct," not only because the jurors disobeyed the judges' orders to refrain from discussing the case with outsiders, but also because they skirted their responsibility to decide the case themselves.
Deputy Attorney General Lloyd Carter, representing the state, observed that both jurors had already been leaning toward a death sentence for Danks and urged the court to view their behavior as a minor transgression.
"I think that what these two women did, although unfortunate, was perfectly understandable in the context of deciding a death penalty case," he said.
The crux issue for the court is whether the two jurors prejudiced the outcome of the trial.
In 1992, the court confronted a similar situation in which one juror brought a Bible into the jury room and read aloud passages commanding that murderers receive the death penalty.
In that case, a bailiff discovered the Bible. The trial judge then gave a strongly worded warning to the jurors to not consult outside books and to reach a decision based only on the evidence and the law. The high court found that was an adequate cure to the juror's misconduct and affirmed the death sentence. People v. Mincey, 2 Cal.4th 408.
In the current case, the actions of K.A. and B.P. were not discovered until after trial, at which point Superior Court Judge Richard Oberholzer refused to order a retrial.
"The court finds it difficult to reason that visiting a church or a synagogue or reading a prayer book or a Bible is anything less than a human act," he said.
Nonetheless, the court has adopted a zero tolerance policy for prosecutors quoting the Bible during closing arguments.
In 1998, the court overturned a capital conviction, in part because the prosecutor attempted to persuade the jury that the biblical maxim, "Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord," should not be interpreted as trumping "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
"We cannot emphasize too strongly that to ask the jury to consider biblical teachings when deliberating is patent misconduct," Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar wrote for a unanimous court in People v. Hill, 17 Cal.4th 800.
During last Wednesday's argument, however, Werdegar did not sound as disapproving of what the Danks jurors did.
"I don't read the record as saying they were seeking guidance on the appropriateness of the death penalty, but spiritual comfort in reaching this big decision," she said, adding later: "I think this is misconduct, but the real issue is what do we do?"
Danks picked up some sympathy from Justice Joyce L. Kennard, Carlos R. Moreno and Chief Justice Ronald George.
"Do you consider it significant that we have not only one juror, K.A., who was stressed?" Kennard asked Spiegel. "We have two jurors who, without consulting each other, each consult pastors who say it's OK to kill according to the Bible."
But Justices Ming W. Chin, Janice Rogers Brown and Marvin Baxter each suggested that the trial might not have turned out any differently if the two jurors had refrained from consulting their pastors.
Chin said it sounded from the jurors' post-trial declarations as if they had already made up their minds before going to church. Brown said, "The fact that someone knows the Bible talks about capital punishment doesn't tell you that person is biased."
Commenting on juror K.A., Brown added: "What if she memorized passages or found them on her own?"
Baxter was perhaps the most blunt of the bunch. He said the court couldn't resolve the issue without taking into account that Danks killed seven people.
"I don't see how you can make this decision without considering everything," he said. "I would suggest that juror misconduct, sometimes innocent and in the best of intentions, occurs quite often. That doesn't mean every time it's discovered that a reversal of the judgment of conviction or death must follow."
Court Does Not Open With 'Oyez, Oyez, Let Us Pray'
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Peter Blumberg
Daily Journal Staff Writer
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