Denver – The Colorado Supreme Court ruled today that jurors may submit questions to witnesses during criminal trials, saying the practice does not automatically harm the defendant’s right to a fair trial.
Voting 5-1, the justices turned back appeals by two people who were convicted after trials in which jurors were allowed to ask questions. Defense lawyers had sought to overturn the convictions as well as bar jury questioning, a relatively new feature in Colorado criminal trials.
Yvonne Medina, convicted in 2001 of attacking her ex-boyfriend, argued that the trial judge allowed a juror to ask a question that resulted in irrelevant and speculative testimony that gave prosecutors an unfair advantage.
Her attorney had argued that allowing jurors to ask questions turned them into “mini-prosecutors,” and the mere threat to a defendant’s fair-trial right should prompt the court to ban the practice.
Justices said Medina’s judge shouldn’t have allowed the disputed question but that the answer – in which a prosecution investigator said witnesses change their stories up to 20 percent of the time – didn’t unfairly affect her defense.
In the other case, Philip Irvin Moses appealed after he was convicted in Aurora in 2000 of first-degree assault and other charges for hitting a police officer with his car.
The court ruled that Moses’ rights weren’t affected by the possibility that jurors overheard a discussion among the judge and attorneys about whether a juror question could be submitted to a witness.
Medina and Moses’ challenges were the first to reach the Supreme Court under a pilot juror-question program launched in September 2000. Under the pilot program, judges were given directions on how to deal with questions to protect defendants’ rights.
Jury questioning was made permanent in June 2002, but judges were given full discretion on whether to allow questions and how to handle them, without the directions mandated in the pilot program.
Prosecutors or defense attorneys may still object to a juror’s proposed question and may ask follow-up questions.
“We are confident that, with adequate safeguards in place, a defendant’s constitutional rights will be protected should a juror propound an inadmissible question or should a juror’s bias manifest itself through the questioning of a witness,” the court ruled today.
The justices said that if an appeals court determines that a trial judge allowed an improper jury question, a conviction can still stand if the answer “did not substantially influence the verdict or impair the fairness of the trial.” During oral arguments in May, Assistant Attorney General Roger Billotte said when jurors are allowed to ask questions that are filtered through the judge, the prosecution and defense attorneys, they often have a more complete understanding of a case and can deliberate without speculating on unanswered questions.
He said juror questioning has been upheld by every federal appeals court that has considered it, and by most state supreme courts.
Most states give judges the authority to allow juror questions.
The practice is prohibited in Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska and Texas, according to the National Center for State Courts.
