Juror Removed For Religious Statement Made In Deliberations

[rug]

Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Posted by Howard Friedman

According to FirstCoast News, in a Jacksonville, Florida federal district courtroom earlier this month, a jury found former Congresswoman Corrine Brown guilty on 18 counts of fraud and corruption. The jury's decision came a day after the judge removed one of the jurors (referred to as Juror 13) from the panel. The judge took action against Juror 13 after another juror sent the judge a letter complaining about Juror 13's religious remarks. Near the beginning of deliberations, Juror 13 told the others that the Holy Spirit had told him Congresswoman Brown was not guilty on all charges. The full transcript of the judge's questioning Juror 13 before deciding to remove him from the jury makes interesting reading.

Transcript:

However, last night my courtroom deputy received an unsolicited call from a juror. And the content of that call --of course, it was a -- this is just a recounting of it, and ha sto be understood as such. But the essence of it was that this juror said that she was calling on her own behalf, but thought that other jurors were concerned as well.

Her -- she expressed a concern about another juror,that from the beginning this juror was talking about, quote,higher beings, close quote.

She said something to the effect that this other juror was making comments about higher beings and also mentioned Congresswoman Brown's name.

At that point my courtroom deputy stopped the juror and said that she was -- could not discuss anything to do with the case with her and that she would bring the matter to my attention, which she did last night.

And based upon that, the court notified counsel bye-mail overnight that this had occurred and said we would convene a hearing at 8:15 this morning in order to discuss it. That is the substance of what was said.

Case 3:16-cr-00093-TJC-JRK Document 139 Filed 05/15/17 Page 5 of 79 Page ID 2049

http://religionclause.blogspot.com/2017/05/juror-removed-for-religious-satement.html

[Hortensis]

1. Interesting. It sounds as if the dismissed juror was ignoring

the instructions to the jury. After all, they are convened to act as triers of facts, not to act as messengers from a higher being.

Whoops. Just noticed this is the religion group. Didn't mean to jump in.

[rug]

2. More to the point, she was making decisions based on things not in the record.

[Hortensis]

3. Lol. Seems like. I'm guessing I wouldn't bother

trying to evaluate the facts presented either if I had a direct conduit to incontrovertible truth.