For those readers who recall the case in SDFLA concerning the juror who stated the Holy Spirit had told him the defendant was innocent, in which the defendant appealed based on the juror’s dismissal was unfair and lost the first appeal, the defendant, former Rep Corinne Brown, has won the second appeal, a rare en banc reconsideration by the 11th Circuit:
The panel in a 2-1 decision affirmed the conviction (Rosenbaum for the majority and Pryor for the dissent). The en banc court lined up as you would expect it, with the 7 conservative judges saying you can’t strike a juror based on a religious vote, while the 4 moderate judges dissented … [SDFLA Blog]
Dissenting Judge Rosenbaum states it best:
Every judge of this Court agrees on this much: the same rule governs dismissal of both the juror who says his religious authority told him the defendant is not guilty on all charges and the one who says his religious authority told him the defendant is guilty on all charges. So let’s be clear about what we’re really doing today: we are holding that a district judge is powerless to dismiss a juror who, on a record like this one, says the Holy Spirit told him the defendant is guilty on all charges and he trusts the Holy Spirit—even though the judge finds after investigation that the juror is not capable of basing his guilty verdict on the evidence but instead will base his verdict on what he perceives to be a divine revelation. Just think about that. We are prohibiting district judges, on records like this one, from dismissing jurors they find beyond a reasonable doubt will return a guilty verdict that is not based on the evidence. Why bother with the trial? Yet while the Majority Opinion guarantees this result, it invokes the grandeur of the right to a jury trial, ironically dedicating an entire section to how its decision protects the rights of defendants to unanimous jury verdicts.
Indeed, why bother with a trial? It’s not a rhetorical question. Rosenbaum has pointed at a key intellectual mistake by the majority in this case, the confusion of the best, shared efforts of a representative group of humanity, vs the alleged message of an alleged all-knowing Divine creature.
This is a category error.
And a tragedy. All it takes is one juror – earnest or bribed – to invoke the Holy Spirit, and a defendant, hands red with blood, can walk free.
