Tagged: impartial peers

Student Perspective: Making A Murderer Event

POST WRITTEN BY: Danielle Petretta (’17), J.D. Pace Law School

On March 2, 2016, Pace Law School’s Criminal Justice Society, Student Bar Association, and the Criminal Justice Institute held an event on the controversial and popular Netflix 10-episode documentary, “Making a Murderer.” The documentary centers on a man named Steven Avery, who found himself stuck deep in the trenches of our criminal justice legal system within a very small knit rural community in Wisconsin.

Steven Avery spent 18 years in prison for a crime he did not commit and in 2003 was finally exonerated. This case received much attention including an effort to pass a bill – the Avery Bill – implementing checks and balances regarding police interrogations, handling and testing of DNA evidence, and policies surrounding an eye witness identification procedures to prevent wrongful convictions.  However, his nightmares continued, as just two years later he was arrested for the murder of 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach. Steven Avery’s nephew, Brenden Dassey, was also arrested for partaking in the Halbach murder. Both Steven Avery and Brenden Dassey remain in prison to date and Steven Avery continues to claim his innocence this time around as well. It is yet to be determined what the status of their appeal is, and the documentary leaves gaping concerns and questions to be answered. The documentary maps Steven Avery’s unfortunate journey through the legal system to date and takes the viewer on a shocking ride.

Did the fact that the Avery’s lived in Manitowoc County, a small knit community, affect the way in which they were treated? Did the appearances and social status of the Avery and Dassey families play an influential role in their prosecutions? Why was the police department involved in the first case able to have a continued presence and involvement in the subsequent Halbach case? Was the evidence tampered with? Were proper police procedures followed? Did someone tipped off the woman who found Teresa Halback’s car in the Avery’s 4,000 car lot within just a few minutes? Why was the same judge deciding Avery’s motion for a new trial when he had been the presiding judge in his trial? What happened in the jury room? Why was the key, one main piece of evidence against Avery, found days after the seventh search?

The discussion panel held at this fabulous event consisted of professors, former prosecutors, and the Greenburg Chief of Police. Professors of professional responsibility, criminal procedure and criminal practice  provided valuable feedback responding to many of the questions continuously discussed. After the initial introduction of the topic by the panelists, the room flooded with questions and comments about the documentary, what it portrayed as well as what it didn’t establish. Discussions and comments about the police work sparked much attention among the crowd of students and current attorneys, and critiques and opinion regarding the prosecution and defense lawyers’ conduct triggered a heated response from the audience.

This discussion panel coupled with the audience forum offered an amazing opportunity for students, attorneys, professors, and community members to debate and challenge the current criminal justice legal system that is so embedded within our society.

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The Pistorius Verdict

As the Pistorius trial proceeded – unprecedentedly on television –some of the differences between South African criminal procedure and US or New York criminal procedure have been obvious. Now that the verdict is in, we have the luxurious opportunity to reflect on how those differences played out. Until the full verdict is available a full analysis is not possible but a few comparative observations are worth making.

The most striking visible comparison at this homicide trial was the absence of a twelve-person lay jury and the presence of a single judicial factfinder who, assisted by two assessors, sat in judgment of the defendant. The rendition of a verdict magnifies this difference. In New York, as in the rest of the United States, of course, the law forbids a criminal jury from explaining its guilty/not guilty verdict in any way, even to the point of prohibiting any sort of questions or special interrogatories that we regularly use in civil cases. Even when jurors are interviewed post-trial and actually tell the media why they decided a case the way they did, that information has absolutely no legal significance unless there has been an invasion into the jury room, e.g., a bribe, a newspaper article, and the like. To be sure, we do have judicial factfinders who explain their findings of fact in detail and on the record; but in most cases those factfinders are making factual determinations in connection with legal rulings, e.g., suppression hearings, sentencing, and the like – and not judging the guilt or non-guilt of fellow citizens, with all the consequences of that determination.

There are good reasons for our prohibition about impeaching a jury’s verdict. Briefly, those reasons stem from the role of the jury in our system – the people in the courtroom – and the freedom of that group of supposedly “impartial” “peers” to do what it thinks is best and for whatever reasons it wants, without fear of reprisal or reversal. That is a basic protection for defendants in our system, and, accordingly, we devote a tremendous amount of resources to jury selection and the jury process.  In South Africa, however, the jury trial was abolished along with apartheid, and the jury in a murder case – like Pistorius – consists of a judge and two assisting assessors – two jurors who, as far as I can tell, have never appeared publicly during the trial, certainly not during the announcement of their own verdict.

Less protection for the accused? Greater protection for the accused? Different protection for the accused? If you’re looking for the power of the people to do what they want to render a just verdict, that protection is missing. Visually, this is striking – a single judge is handing down the decision of guilty or not guilty. But there is something comforting about knowing exactly why the factfinder decided as it did. Of course, we are familiar with the underlying notion in our system that one way we limit judicial discretion is to require a judge to write down reasons for his or her rulings – both because it forces the judge to justify and articulate the findings and so that those rulings can be reviewed. But more than that, on a human level, it just feels right to require anyone who judges another human being – and condemns him – to explain why.

A different set of protections, to be sure. But food for comparative thought.

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