Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Court of Appeals affirms grant of new trial because an actually biased juror who had not been adequately rehabilitated served on the jury.

Ries v. State, Minn.Ct.App., 12/19/2016.  It is structural error, requiring automatic reversal, for a trial court to permit a biased juror to sit on a jury.  State v. Logan, 535 N.W.2d 320 (Minn. 1995); State v. Fraga, 864 N.W.2d 615 (Minn. 2015).  Here, the question wasn't whether a juror who served on the panel was biased, she was.  Rather, the question was whether the trial judge had adequately rehabilitated her.

The trial judge denied Mr. Ries’s motion to strike for cause a potential juror who said that she would side with a police officer’s testimony in large part because of her work as a 911 operator; she considered herself as having the officers’ backs.  The trial judge purported to rehabilitate this potential juror and at trial was satisfied that he had done so, allowing the juror to serve.  Mr. Ries did not use one of his remaining peremptory challenges to remove her.  The jury found Mr. Ries guilty.  

Mr. Ries did not appeal his conviction, but eventually he did file a post-conviction petition in which he complained about the seating of this biased juror.  (He also complained, unsuccessfully,  about a suppression ruling.)  Following a post-conviction hearing, however, the post conviction judge (who was the same as the trial judge) reversed himself and granted a new trial because this juror had expressed actual bias and had not been rehabilitated after all.  

The Court of Appeals upheld the reversal of the conviction and grant of a new trial.  The court agreed that this juror had not been rehabilitated. The court reviewed past cases that had addressed the rehabilitation question, pointing out what had been deemed to be rehabilitation and what had not. 

Of equal importance the court also said that it was not necessary for Mr. Ries to have used all of his peremptory challenges in order to preserve the juror bias issue for appeal.  The court relied upon a U.S. Supreme Court opinion for support for that pronouncement, U.S. v. Martinez-Salazar, 528 U.S. 304 (2000).

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