Jury nullification hypothetical

On Jun 4, 6:58 am, Alan McKenney <alan_mckenn...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hypothetical:
>
>     DA presents slam-dunk murder case.  Jury votes to
>     acquit.  The next day, Juror A says in a nationally-televised
>     interview, "We knew he was guilty as hell, but none of us
>     was going to put a white man in jail just for killing a [insert
>     racial epithet], so we all decided to vote not guilty."
>
> Questions:
>
>     1.  Could the defendent be retried (according to the same logic
>          as when there is jury tampering)?

Jeopardy attaches once the jury is empaneled.  If the acquittal was not due to any misconduct by defendant, he cannot be retried in the same jurisdiction on the same charge again, under the double jeopardy Constitutional prohibition.   But he could be tried under e.g. a Federal crime of depriving a person of his civil rights, or under the laws of another state if the act he was accused of amounted to a separate crime in the other jurisdiction.   If you kidnap someone in MD, rape her in DC and then murder her somewhere along the line and dump the body in VA, you could be tried and convicted in all three jurisdictions of separate crimes, for the same acts.

>     2.  Is juror A in danger of any legal penalties?

Maybe, but I doubt it.   You could say he violated his oath as a juror and then admitted it publicly. Of course even a "confession" doesn't "prove" anything.  Juror A could just be "puffing" to boost his status among his bigoted friends and neighbors and we still don't know what really went on in the jury room.  OR he could be insane.

The scenario is highly unlikely to unfold the way you state, since even in the dark days of the pre-civil rights era bigots generally hid their true feelings in a legal context, so no one really knows what could happen -- IMO it would be a matter of first impression (i.e. it never came up before).   If you want to see what _really_ happened in such cases, read or watch one of the very good nonfiction books or documentaries that have come out lately about the Emmett Till case.

>     2b.  Are the other jurors in danger of legal penalties?

Probably even less so.   They didn't admit to anything and probably would deny what Juror A said, if they were forced to reveal what went on in the jury room.

>     Assuming the answer to any of these is yes, would any
> corroborating evidence,
>     beyond the TV interview, be needed?

Your guess is as good as mine.   My guess is, it would never come up because nobody is going to be that stupid.  If it gets to the point where someone sane _is_ going to say that, then the rule of law has already broken down anyway, and so no one is going to punish the bigots because they are only saying what society around them also believes and approves.  Heaven forfend we should ever retrogress so far, but it's not unheard of for a society to degenerate that way.  The day a Palestinian court tries and finds guilty an Arab defendant for murdering a Jew, I will believe peace is possible in the Holy Land.   If such a case even got as far as a trial in the present day, I suspect a scenario much like the one you hypothesize might develop, in a society where even the kindergarten books say what a good thing it is to kill a Jew.

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