Jury tampering

Jury tampering is the crime of unduly attempting to influence the composition and/or decisions of a jury during the course of a trial. In the United States, people have also been charged with jury tampering for handing out pamphlets and flyers indicating that jurors have certain rights and obligations, including an obligation to vote their conscience notwithstanding the instructions they are given by the judge.

The means by which this crime could be perpetrated can include attempting to discredit potential jurors to ensure they will not be selected for duty. Once selected, jurors could be bribed or intimidated to act in a certain manner on duty. It could also involve making unauthorized contact with them for the purpose of introducing prohibited outside information and then arguing for a mistrial.

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, the Criminal Justice Act 2003 allows for non-jury trials when there is danger of jury tampering, or where jury tampering has taken place. On 18 June 2009, the Court of Appeal in England and Wales made a landmark ruling that resulted in the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, allowing the first-ever criminal trial to be held without a jury by invoking Section 44 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The case in question involved four men accused of an armed robbery at Heathrow Airport in February 2004. After three juries either failed to reach verdicts or were discharged, the fourth trial of the case took place before a single judge, and ended on 31 March 2010 with guilty verdicts for all four accused.

Levels of jury tampering were reported in 2003 to be "worryingly high" in Merseyside by the then Chief Constable Norman Bettison and the then Home Secretary David Blunkett.

Cases of jury tampering

• Gil Dozier, Louisiana Commissioner of Agriculture and Forestry, was charged with jury tampering while on bail and after being convicted of five felonies, including extortion and racketeering. He served nearly four years in prison.
• James Riddle "Jimmy" Hoffa, a trade union leader, was convicted of jury tampering in 1964.
• The former West Virginia Governor, William Wallace Barron was convicted of jury tampering in 1971.
• George Pape, a jury foreman in a 1987 trial of John Gotti, sought out Gotti's underlings, who agreed to pay him $75,000 in exchange for a not guilty vote. Pape was later convicted of jury tampering and sentenced to three years imprisonment.
• In 2007, an attempt to bribe a juror in a case investigating cigarette smuggling in Northern Ireland led to the retrial being heard by a judge sitting alone, the first such ruling.

In fiction

• John Grisham's book The Runaway Jury and the film adaptation Runaway Jury both depict jury tampering.
• The Juror is a 1996 film which depicts jury tampering, as does the novel by George Dawes Green on which it was based.
• In Season 2 Episode 10 of Hot in Cleveland Elka Ostrovsky tampered with Juror No. 8 but he forgot and she was said to be guilty
• In Season 3 Episode 19 of Castle there was a suspected case of jury tampering. Juror No. 7 died of cyanide poisoning in the murder trial of an heiress.
• In the ITV drama The Jury a juror, Paul, is brought evidence by a former jury member on the case (the case is in retrial) she turns out to not be a jury member as she claimed and is the victim's sister.
• In The Sopranos, Corrado Soprano Jr. persuades a single juror not to deliver a guilty verdict against him by hiring someone to find him and threaten the safety of his family.
• In the final episode of Series 2 of Sherlock, the primary antagonist, Moriarty, blackmails jury members during a court case by hacking into their hotel television systems to threaten their families, an example of jury tampering.

See also

• Embracery
• Obstruction of justice
• Witness tampering

External links

• Criminal Justice Act 2003. Chapter 44, Part 7. Trials on indictment without a jury
• What is 'jury tampering'?. Videojug.