Should juries be polled post-verdict to ensure impartiality?

Once a jury reaches a verdict, should members be questioned about their decision-making process? That’s the question under consideration at the U.S. Supreme Court in a case that pits jury autonomy against safeguards to prevent racial bias in the judicial system.

The general rule is that jury deliberations are to be kept confidential, to protect jurors from having their decision-making process laid open to public critique and to protect jurors from harassment.

But lawyers for Miguel Pena-Rodriguez say they need to question the jurors that convicted their client to determine whether racial bias played a role in their deliberations.

A Colorado jury convinced Pena-Rodriguez on several misdemeanor counts of unlawful sexual conduct after he groped two teenage sisters in a bathroom at a racetrack where he worked.

After the verdict, two jurors told his lawyers that another juror—a former policeman—said in the deliberation room that Pena-Rodriguez must be guilty, “because he’s Mexican, and Mexican men take whatever they want.”

Pena-Rodriguez’s lawyers asked the trial judge to look into it, but he declined, citing Colorado’s “no impeachment rule” of not questioning a jury. The U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment guarantees an accused person the right to an impartial jury, but Pena-Rodriguez claims the “no impeachment rule” is keeping his legal team from finding out if the jury really was impartial. Besides, as his lawyer Jeffrey Fisher pointed out, Colorado allows some exceptions to that rule, so why not here, too?

Chief Justice John Roberts wanted Fisher to explain just where the line should be drawn.

“What about religious bias?” Roberts asked. “Same thing in this case, except it’s not, you know, this is how Mexicans act. It’s this is how Catholics or Jews act, so they’re obviously guilty. Wouldn’t that also come under your exception?”

Fisher admitted religion and other exceptions might warrant post-verdict questioning but seemed to suggest race considerations are unique and therefore need special consideration.

Pointing to the current climate on college campuses, where almost anything can be considered offensive, Justice Samuel Alito questioned how a judge could separate intentional racial bias from off-hand comments that another juror might consider problematic.

Fisher had a more sympathetic reception from Justice Elena Kagan, who thought of the case more in terms of the equal-protection-under-the-law guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. And this case offered “the best smoking-gun evidence” of race bias in the jury room, she said.

“But it’s true that this is a Sixth Amendment case, but it seems artificial not to think about the Sixth Amendment issue as informed by the principles of the Equal Protection Clause,” Kagan said. “And in those principles, as we’ve always understood them, says that there’s a special kind of harm in treating people worse and, I mean, and certainly, in punishing people because of their race.”

Colorado Solicitor General Frederick Yarger said the juror’s racist comment didn’t justify violating the safeguards put in place to ensure “full and fair debate” in the jury room.

“And the juror’s alleged statements in this case are no doubt reprehensible, but the vital interests that the no-impeachment rule serves apply just as readily here as they do in other serious alleged cases of juror misconduct and bias,” he concluded.

Clearly, the justices weren’t united in their views on this case, which suggests a narrow ruling in favor of Pena-Rodriguez, who never served time for his conviction. He was sentenced to two years probation and required to register as a sex offender.

Listen to Mary Reichard’s full “Legal Docket” report on the Oct. 24, 2016 episode of The World and Everything in It.