Court of Appeals of Mississippi Makes Questionable Rule 606(b) Ruling

Similar to its federal counterpart, Mississippi Rule of Evidence 606(b) provides as follows:

(b) During an Inquiry into the Validity of a Verdict or Indictment.

(1) Prohibited Testimony or Other Evidence. 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.

(2) Exceptions. A juror may testify about whether:

(A) extraneous prejudicial information was improperly brought to the jury’s attention; or

(B) an outside influence was improperly brought to bear on any juror.

In most cases, jurors will not be able to impeach their verdict under Rule 606(b), but I wonder whether the Court of Appeals of Mississippi applied the rule correctly in its recent opinion in Ellzey v. State, 2024 WL 4822584 (Miss. App. 2024).

In Ellzey, “[f]ollowing a jury trial, Lindin Ellzey was convicted of three counts of fondling his stepdaughter.” Previously, allegations of Ellzey abusing his stepdaughter were reviewed by the Mississippi Department of Human Services (DHS), which found the allegation of abuse was “unsubstantiated.”

After Ellzey was convicted, he filed a motion for a new trial. Part of that motion consisted of a statement by Stephanie Beverly, “a potential juror on the panel who was not chosen,” who stated that “a female juror told the jury during deliberations that her husband works at either Forrest General Hospital or South Central Regional Medical Center and…shared her husband’s belief that ‘DHS always drops the ball.'”

The trial court

found “that this alleged comment [was] hearsay on multiple levels and there [was] no way to determine if this alleged comment from the juror was in fact made.” The trial court also found that even if the comment “was actually made,” it was simply “part of that juror’s ‘personal knowledge and experience’ and not the sort of outside influence contemplated by Rule 606(b)(2).”

The Court of Appeals of Mississippi agreed, concluding that

“[J]urors are permitted to bring some degree of personal knowledge and experience into the deliberation process without jeopardizing their verdict.”…Indeed, as in most cases, the jury in this case was instructed, “You are…permitted to draw such reasonable inferences from the evidence as seem justified in the light of your own experience.”…In Perkins, a medical malpractice case, a juror who was a nurse allegedly stated during deliberations “that she was familiar with what doctors go through and…that the doctor would lose his medical license or have his license suspended” if the jury returned a verdict for the plaintiffs….She also allegedly urged her fellow jurors to “vote for the [d]efendant” “for that reason.”…Nonetheless, this Court held that the juror’s alleged statements were not the sort of “extraneous information” that would warrant an investigation under Gladney….

In the present case, the unnamed juror’s alleged statement about DHS’s competence does not involve “extraneous prejudicial information” admissible under Rule 606(b). The juror’s belief or opinion that “DHS always drops the ball” does not involve any extra-record facts about Ellzey or about this case. Rather, it is simply a general belief or opinion about the competence of a government agency. Therefore, the trial judge did not abuse his discretion by finding that the alleged statement was simply “part of that juror’s ‘personal knowledge and experience’ and not the sort of outside influence contemplated by Rule 606(b)(2).” 

I take two issues with this ruling. The first is that it’s unclear whether this was pre-existing knowledge that the juror had before being selected. If this is something her husband said to her before she was selected for the jury, it would be fine. If she had asked for his opinion during trial, that would seem to clearly trigger the exception for extraneous prejudicial information. This ties into my second issue, which is that the efficacy of DHS investigations seems central to this case. If DHS dropped the ball regarding the first allegation of abuse, it supports that theory that Ellzey could have previously abused his stepdaughter, making it likelier he fondled her in the case at hand. On the other hand, if DHS did not drop the ball, the evidence was lacking regarding the prior allegation of abuse, making it likelier that the current claim could lack corroboration.

Now, if the juror in question were called into court, what she said could have turned out to be a nothingburger. But I think I would have liked to see the court dig deeper rather than rejecting the issue out of hand.

-CM