An interesting decision today from Colorado. The Supreme Court overturned a death sentence after it was discovered some jurors brought bibles into the deliberation room and looked up Old Testament passages.

It's a strange decision. The court wants to assert that using the bible contravened the instruction to not consider evidence outside the courtroom; yet they also acknowledge that a verdict is necessarily based partly on the morals & beliefs of the jury members, which they bring into the room independent of evidence issues.

I would've been hopping mad if I were the defendant finding out I was sentenced according to the Old Testament (guess they didn't get to the page with "thou shalt not kill").

But I'm not sure it's the right decision to overturn the verdict. Juries can find any verdict they want. They can disregard all the evidence and go with their gut instinct. A case is going to have conflicting evidence anyhow -- part of the jury's job is to decide which evidence and which witnesses are credible and which are not.

They also, especially during sentencing, are asked to apply a moral judgment, and that's why we select 12 human beings to do the job and don't just look it up in some sentencing index. The judges in Colorado seemed to think it was important that certain jurors brought bibles into the deliberation room. What if they had memorized the passages? What if it was a secular text?

The court eventually rested its decision on the possibility that jurors might have been unreasonably influenced by the bible passages. But part of what we want jurors to do is influence each other -- that's the most likely way to get a unanimous verdict. It's a puzzling result, and an illustration of why we never ask a jury "why" in a criminal trial.

28 Mar 05