ADR Prof Blog by Andrea Schneider, Michael Moffitt, Sarah Cole,Art Hinshaw, Jill Gross and Cynthia Alkon.
Last week, the Washington Supreme Court reversed a conviction in State v Lamar on the grounds that jury deliberations must be “full and complete.” The StoelRives blog noticeofappeal.org summarizes the case this way:
In State v. Lamar, the trial court reconstituted the jury with an alternate midway through deliberations after one of the original jurors became ill. The trial court did not instruct the reconstituted jury to begin deliberations on all aspects of the case anew but, rather, directed the 11 original jurors to bring the alternate “up to speed” and resume deliberations from that point. Even though Lamar did not object to this instruction at trial and all members of the reconstituted jury reported that they voted to convict when polled, the Supreme Court reversed, holding that the failure to issue a new deliberation instruction was a manifest error affecting a constitutional right and that prejudice was presumed because inherent in the right to a unanimous jury verdict is the right to have a verdict based on full and complete deliberation. The trial court’s instruction, which the jury was presumed to follow, directed otherwise. Accordingly, there was no assurance that the verdict was based on required deliberation.
My interest in the case is not so much from the jury deliberation perspective or the constitutional rights presumed to attach to the role of juries (although both are interesting). Instead, the case makes me wonder what we know (and mostly don’t know) about the impacts of adding new parties to negotiations.
A big battle is shaping up in Congress in the next few weeks over extending the Bush tax cuts. If Congress does not act before the end of the year,...
By Joe MarkowitzThis article originally appeared in the January 1999 issue of Consensus, a newspaper published jointly by the Consensus Building Institute and the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program.For two decades, specialists from...
By David FairmanFrom the Blog of Phyllis G. Pollack. Recently, I came across the unpublished decision in Benesch v. Green, 2009 WL 4885215, Case No. C-07-3784 EDL (N.D. Cal. Dec. 17,...
By Phyllis Pollack
With the purchase of a Featured Membership, you will be shown on the front page of Mediate.com to web site visitors from your city and region (“state” if you are in the USA). You may appear in more than one city/region by purchasing additional locations.
