The Kentucky Court of Appeals today reviewed a case of juror misconduct from Christian County which, if true, should be a little frightening to the criminal trial bar. The Christian Circuit Court (Judge Andrew Self) granted a new trial upon being presented with affidavits from two jurors indicating that another juror had informed other jurors– during the guilt phase deliberations– that a murder conviction would result on parole eligibility in 4 years (20%). (You can probably guess that Defendant was convicted of murder.) In fact, of course, any non-capital murder conviction currently carries a requirement to serve 85%, to a maximum of twenty years, before parole eligibility. Hopefully, the juror did not get this information from a law blog. We wrote on a similar topic involving “facebooking” jurors a couple months ago here.
The Court of Appeals reversed here solely for the trial court to conduct a contested evidentiary hearing rather than relying only on affidavits. So, there is no final determination that this actually happened, but we do know that the Circuit judge was convinced of it at the time.
