What if all jurors are threatend after jury is seated and trial started?

April 18, 2024 2:48 PM

As I understand it in a criminal trial there are some alternate jurors who hear the case but are not involved in rendering the final verdict. What happens if the defendant, just before deliberations begin, threatens to beat up all the jurors who vote to convict? If there are not 12 alternate jurors to replace the ones now fearing for their lives what is the outcome? And anyway, the alternate jurors will also be intimidated by the threat. Would you have to start the trial over? Will there be a default ruling of guilty by the judge?
posted by SweetLiesOfBokonon to Law & Government (7 answers total)

Best answer: It all depends where. In common law countries you would not have a ‘default’ ruling, guilty or otherwise; you may have a mistrial.

In NSW where I am, first, intimidation like this would be its own separate [extremely serious] offence. Secondly, the judge would have the option of either declaring a mistrial and starting again, or continuing proceedings as judge-alone.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:33 PM on April 18 [3 favorites]

Best answer: If you threaten all the jurors, and the jurors drop out of the trial, it's a mistrial. If you threaten all the jurors and they are so scared they vote to acquit, you are acquitted.

Either way you have committed a serious crime that you could then be charged with.

In some ways this is like asking "What if someone kills or bribes the witnesses against them, won't we have trouble convicting?" and the answer is yes, we would have trouble convicting then. There are various crimes you can try committing to get out of your previous crimes.
posted by mark k at 3:51 PM on April 18 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Of course, there's another situation one might imagine, where the defendant's friends and allies threaten the jurors, completely on their own initiative. That would be jury-tampering. But you'd still wind up with a mistrial.
posted by adamrice at 5:02 PM on April 18 [1 favorite]

I got called recently for a jury where this was a real concern and the jury was anonymous - we were handed random numbers at the first day of jury selection and only numbers were used throughout the process. My understanding is that in some cases they will also have all the jurors go to a random location and then transport them to the courthouse to make it much more difficult to intimidate jurors or follow them home.

The above was for a US federal case in NYC.
posted by A Blue Moon at 5:24 PM on April 18 [7 favorites]

In some locations, they don't even decide which ones are the alternates until nearly time to deliberate. (I'd imagine this ensures they're all paying as much attention as possible.)

With luck, they end up with enough jurors left that just do not give a ____.
Then again, the defendant would be smarter not to cause that situation. One would think the defendant would realize that their behavior (or those of their friends/cult members) would reflect badly on them and see to deter any chance of that.
posted by stormyteal at 7:49 PM on April 18 [3 favorites]

Will there be a default ruling of guilty by the judge?

Absolutely not! The point of a trial is to present the evidence in a fair and impartial way. If that hasn't happened (juror intimidation, whole trial hasn't been concluded), another trial must happen.

A new trial would likely result, with better procedures in place to protect the anonymity of the jurors. And a separate charge of voter intimidation would likely proceed (may be it's own trial later).
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:35 AM on April 19

People are missing that in the hypothetical given, the defendant threatened the jurors. In my experience, jurisdictions have case law that says that a defendant cannot receive a mistrial that he intentionally created. So in this case, the jury would still go to deliberations.
posted by TheLinenLenin at 6:20 AM on April 20