Denver Post
Sunday, March 23, 1997
Empire Magazine Section
Email: letters@denverpost.com
empire@denverpost.com
We haven't heard the last of Kriho contempt case
By Robert Kowalski
On March 7, with several dozen protesters gathered outside his courtroom,
a judge in Gilpin County ordered University of Colorado researcher Laura
Kriho to pay $1,200 for contempt of court in a case that has garnered national
attention.
Kriho was a juror in a trial of a 19-year-old woman who was charged with possession of the illegal drug methamphetamine, and after Kriho refused to vote in favor of conviction, she was charged with and convicted of contempt of court.
Prosecutors in that case charged that Kriho
improperly failed to disclose during the jury selection process that she
herself had been arrested on a drug-possession charge years earlier and
failed to
disclose that she opposes drug laws.
Kriho, who is now 32, was 19 when she was arrested on charges of possession of LSD. She agreed to a plea bargain in that case and did not have to do jail time.
Chief Judge Henry Nieto of the 1st Judicial District did not sentence Kriho to jail in the contempt case, even though she faces as much as six months' imprisonment for that conviction. He told Kriho that she knew her beliefs were important in the drug-possession case she was a juror on and she should have disclosed them.
Legal experts around the country have said the contempt conviction against Kriho is extraordinarily unusual for a juror, and her defense lawyer, Paul Grant, has argued that the matter could have a chilling effect on future juries.
The case has been watched by members of the Libertarian Party and criminal defense lawyers' groups around the country.
Grant said Kriho, who lives in Rollinsville, will appeal the contempt conviction. He said she should not have to pay any of the fine imposed on her earlier this month.
Q. Were you surprised you were convicted on the contempt-of-court charge?
A. I was surprised that it was so long, that it was nine pages long. ... It's very unusual for a judge to issue a written ruling in any kind of criminal trial proceeding.
Q. What do you think that means?
A. That means that he took it very seriously.
Q. What about the sentence?
A. Yeah, I was surprised. I thought they wanted to put me in jail.
Q. There was some discussion after your sentencing about doing a fund-raiser to cover your penalty. Has that been done?
A. Yeah, we did one that night and raised $1,205. Five dollars more than the judge's fine against me.
Q. Do you plan to pay that?
A. We have posted it as an appeal bond so the money will be held until the appeals process is over.
Q. When you were empaneled on this jury, did you have any particular agenda?
A. My agenda was to
go home. I thought for sure that I was going to go home. No I didn't have
any agenda. My first agenda was to get out of jury duty. I called the commissioner
that morning and tried to get out of it, since I didn't have a car. I wasn't
sure how I was going to get back and forth from the courthouse. But she
said that I had to show up. I even told her I'd have to hitchhike, and
she said, "Well hitchhiking's not against the law in Colorado, so
if that's what you
have to do to get here, that's what you have to do."
Q. Was this a group jury selection process that you went through?
A. What they did is they seated 13 people in the jury box -- 12 jurors and one alternate -- and then the other people are sitting out in the audience. And they asked questions of the jurors in the jury box, and then as the process went on, jurors were disqualified for various reasons and then other jurors in the audience were called to sit in the jury box and answer questions from the lawyers and the judge. I was selected toward the very end. I think I was the second to the last or third to the last juror selected to sit in the jury box.
Q. You weren't asked directly whether or not you had any prior record, right?
A. No. Somebody was asked about three hours before me had they ever been arrested for a crime before.
Q. And you weren't asked if you had any views on drug laws?
A. No. The only question, the only question that they asked me was "You heard all the other questions asked the other jurors, would you answer any of them differently?" And I was the only juror that did volunteer something to that question. All the other jurors said no. And I volunteered a recent court experience we had in Nederland where we sued a developer.
Q. What about the response to the question about whether you were ever arrested?
A. It was three hours before me. There were 350 questions asked before I took the jury box.
Q. So you just didn't think about it?
A. Well, to me it seemed like all the other jurors answered no to that question. How am I supposed to answer 350 questions. ... It's such a vague question that I don't know how they expected a realistic answer out of anybody.
What they said in my ruling is that I should have volunteered this information without being specifically asked, and nobody, nobody in that jury selection process volunteered anything to them without being specifically asked, except for me, about this other court case that I had been involved in.
The judge says that I was convicted for failing to volunteer something during jury selection. He said it didn't have anything to do with what I did in the jury room. But to me it seems that if I had voted to convict the girl they would have had no reason to investigate my background and find out about other information. ...
Q. If you lose the appeal, is there a danger of setting a precedent for juries?
A. Yeah, but I think the bigger danger is not taking it to the next step. There's always a risk that you're going to lose.
Q. Have you been called for jury duty before?
A. No, I've been a registered voter in Colorado for 13 years, and I never even got the slip of paper in the mail before.
Q. Can you explain the hemp group (Colorado Hemp Initiative Project) you're part of?
A. We've been working on industrial hemp legislation in the state legislature for the past three years. My interest in hemp is from the environmental perspective, wanting to use hemp as a replacement for trees for paper.
Q. Your interest is not in the psychoactive aspects of it?
A. Our group also favors the legalization of marijuana for medicinal use and personal use, but we've been keeping those issues separate in the state legislature since they are separate varieties of the plant.
Q. Why do you want to legalize hemp?
A. Save the forests.
Q. Are you currently a user of marijuana?
A. Come on, who is ever going to answer that question? ... I don't understand the relevance.
Q. You're part of a group that favors legalizing it. People will wonder if you use it yourself.
A. I take the fifth.
Q. Why do you think marijuana ought to be legalized?
A. Because it's one of the safest and most effective medicinal substances known to man. And nobody's ever died from a marijuana overdose. And you have legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco which kill hundreds of thousands of people every year.
Robert Kowalski is a Denver Post staff writer
and can be reached at newsroom@denverpost.com.
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