The request by Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer to remove a juror for failing to “listen to the law on reasonable doubt” stunned the courtroom at the murder trial on Thursday.
The bar for such a step is high and cannot be based solely on the fact that a juror is a holdout with a minority opinion, said Joshua Marquis, a veteran prosecutor and former district attorney in Oregon.
“The judge would be looking for misconduct, not just someone who is not going along with the others,” he said. “That is essentially the job of a juror, to hold onto their conscience.”
The concern about the juror originated with a note from the jury foreperson to the judge, according to Kevin Reddington, Ms. Clancy’s lawyer. Addressing the judge in open court on Thursday, he said that the juror “refuses to listen to the law you have given on reasonable doubt.”
Mr. Reddington told reporters afterward that “an inquiry by the judge” would take place on Friday morning.
Judge William Sullivan’s assessment of the juror’s conduct would likely resemble the process that played out in court on Thursday, when the judge called each juror before him, one by one, and privately questioned them. This time, though, his questions would likely be more extensive, experts said, as he seeks a broader sense of their interactions during a week of deliberations.
There is no “magic rule” for what jury deliberations must look like, Mr. Marquis said. But in general, jurors must participate in discussions and consider the opinions of others. A problematic scenario, he said, might be a juror who “never considered another opinion, and who said, ‘I don’t care what I hear — I know the person is guilty.”
But judges approach complaints from a juror’s peers with caution, mindful that in the event of a conviction, a removal could be grounds for an appeal. And there are limits on the questions judges can ask about the jury’s private process.
Should a juror be removed in the Clancy trial, he or she would be replaced by one of the six alternate jurors who also sat through weeks of witness testimony. The judge would instruct the jury to start over from the beginning — though in practice, several experts said, verdicts can come swiftly after such a shake-up.
Judge Sullivan’s consideration of the issue on Thursday focused on the jury’s apparent concern that one member was not following the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for finding a defendant guilty. He read the jurors a formal set of instructions reminding them that “proof beyond a reasonable doubt does not mean proof beyond all possible doubt, for everything in the lives of human beings is open to some possible or imaginary doubt.”
The focus on reasonable doubt suggests that the holdout juror may be the lone voice seeking to find Ms. Clancy guilty of murdering her three children, experts said. Mr. Marquis said that would be a highly unusual impasse; more typically, he said, a lone holdout in a jury trial favors acquittal.
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