A Visit From the Ghost of Jury Service Past

What do you remember about November 29, 1995? That was the day when one of the jurors in Jesse Webster’s drug trafficking trial was out sick. The next day, with all twelve jurors again present, Webster was convicted. Many years later, Webster claimed in a petition for post-conviction relief that the eleven jurors who showed up on November 29 improperly proceeded with deliberations that day at the direction of a rogue bailiff.

In response to the petition, an investigator tracked down the jurors to ask them what they recalled about November 29, 1995. The interviews took place between 2001 and 2006. (Evidently, the investigation was not exactly a high priority.) The results, as the Seventh Circuit put it with considerable understatement in an opinion last week, were a “mixed bag”:

The first question was: “The court records show that on one day one of the jurors did not appear. Do you recall any such time when that might have occurred?” Seven jurors said they did not recall a juror being absent; four jurors said they did. Of the four who did remember a juror’s absence, three recalled that an alternate juror replaced the absent juror, a claim wholly unsubstantiated by court records. One of the four thought the juror was absent on the day before Thanksgiving; another claimed the juror was absent on the first two days of deliberations. Two correctly recalled that the absent juror was male; one said the absent juror was female. The second question was: “Do you recall being sent home early because of this juror’s absence?” The jurors answered either “no” or that they did not recall.

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No Harm, No Foul — But How Do You Know If There Was Harm?

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that gives the Court an opportunity to clarify a longstanding ambiguity in harmless error law.  Even if a defendant’s procedural rights have been violated at trial, a conviction will not be reversed on appeal if the error was harmless.  However, the Court has at different times articulated the harmless error standard in two different ways, without ever clearly indicating whether the two formulations are substantively different and, if so, which one is preferred.

In the new case, Vasquez v. United States (No. 11-199), the defendant’s cert. petition focused squarely on this ambiguity, arguing that the majority opinion below (635 F.3d 889 (7th Cir. 2011)) rested on one formulation, while the dissenting opinion rested on the other.  In Vasquez’s view, the choice of harmless error standard is more-or-less dispositive in his case, thus making the case an appropriate platform for deciding which standard is the right one.  In its response, however, the government disputes that there is any substantive difference between the standards.

Here are the (allegedly) competing standards.

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Seventh Circuit Overturns Sentence for Lack of Explanation

Henry and Elizabeth Robertson were involved in a mortgage fraud scheme in the 1990′s.  Many years later, they were charged with and pled guilty to wire fraud for their part in the scheme.  Despite an unusual and compelling story of self-motivated rehabilitation, they were sentenced to 63 and 41 months of imprisonment, with almost no comment by the district judge in response to their arguments for lenience.  Earlier this week, however, the Seventh Circuit vacated the sentences based on this lack of responsiveness.  United States v. Robertson (No. 11-1651).

The decision rests on a line of Seventh Circuit cases going back to United States v. Cunningham, 429 F.3d 673 (7th Cir. 2005).  These cases, which have not been followed in some other circuits, require district judges to address nonfrivolous arguments for a sentence below what is recommend by the sentencing guidelines.  As I discussed in this article, I think the Cunningham rule should be adopted more widely and enforced more rigorously.  For that reason, I’m glad to see the Seventh Circuit reaffirm the rule in Robertson.

Although it does not purport to break any new legal ground, the decision nonetheless has some noteworthy aspects.  

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