Justice Sotomayor Sharply Critiques Anti-Jury Impeachment Rule in Death Penalty Dissent
Federal Rule of Evidence 606(b)(1) provides that
During an inquiry into the validity of a verdict or indictment, a juror may not testify about any statement made or incident that occurred during the jury’s deliberations; the effect of anything on that juror’s or another juror’s vote; or any juror’s mental processes concerning the verdict or indictment. The court may not receive a juror’s affidavit or evidence of a juror’s statement on these matters.
Under this Rule, jurors generally can’t impeach their verdicts with evidence of juror misconduct. There are exceptions to this Rule, but they have been held not to cover jurors lying during voir dire, i.e., jury selection.
Such was the case in Humphreys v. Emmons, in which a prospective juror in a capital case said during voir dire that she was the victim of an attempted rape and robbery, but that she could serve impartially because her attacker never physically harmed her. According to other jurors, however, this juror was dead set on imposing the death penalty based on being attacked and intimidated them during deliberations by screaming and cursing.
On appeal, it was found that these jurors could not impeach their verdict based on allegations of what transpired during deliberations. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court denied cert, but with Justice Sotomayor dissenting, noting the following:
The extreme juror misconduct in this case illustrates the harms of an ironclad no-impeachment rule that prevents consideration of juror testimony to undermine a death verdict….
This case illustrates another “extreme” situation in which the no-impeachment rule likely should have yielded because the juror’s extreme misconduct threatened Humphreys’s Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury….
Importantly, Chancey’s misconduct appears to have singlehandedly changed the verdict from life without parole to death. That places this case squarely among the “gravest and most important” cases in which the no-impeachment rule should yield to avoid “‘violating the plainest principles of justice.’”…
Tragically, the Court denies review instead, allowing a death sentence tainted by a single juror’s extraordinary misconduct to stand. Because it is at best “unclear” whether the Eleventh Circuit applied the correct standard of review in declining to adjudicate Humphreys’s claim on the merits, I would vacate and remand the case for further clarification rather than leave Humphreys’s juror misconduct claim caught in a web of procedural barriers.
To avoid a similar result in future cases of extreme juror misconduct, courts considering such claims ab initio should carefully weigh the aims of the no-impeachment rule against the constitutional requirement to ensure the
impartiality of a death-empaneled jury. Applying the no impeachment rule too reflexively and restrictively risks a “systemic loss of confidence in jury verdicts, a confidence that is a central premise of the Sixth Amendment trial
right,” Pena-Rodriguez, 580 U. S., at 225, and that is all the more imperative when the difference between life and death is at stake. I respectfully dissent from the denial of certiorari.