Letter to the Editor
From: Paul Grant, attorney for Laura Kriho
Denver Post
March 12, 1997
Email: letters@denverpost.com
Your Tuesday editorial ("The runaway juror") supporting Laura Kriho's conviction was concise, consistent, and mistaken.
Your facts are wrong: Laura Kriho was never
convicted of LSD possession -- she entered a plea, received deferred judgment
and sentence, the plea was withdrawn, no judgment ever entered.
There's a huge difference between an arrest record and a felony conviction.
You laud the court for not making the case about how Laura Kriho voted as a juror. Baloney. She was the one holdout juror, a mistrial was declared, she was investigated. Had she voted guilty, no one would have cared what she believed.
The case was about deliberations in the jury room -- an unprecedented invasion of the privileged communications of the jury room. If you read the contempt citation, you would note that it is loaded with allegations as to what Laura said in the jury room.
You say Laura misled the trial court and
attorneys during jury selection. You must have missed the transcript. When
jurors were asked a nonsense question as to whether they had heard all
the previous hours of questions, and whether their answer to any question
would be any different than any prior juror, Laura Kriho is the only juror
who volunteered some information. Half a dozen others said none of their
answers would have been any different. Laura discussed a recent court
experience.
If you had read the transcript, you would
know Laura Kriho never answered any question falsely, thus the court found
her not guilty of perjury. She was found guilty of the newly minted
offense of "not volunteering information which she knew the court
and attorneys would have wanted to know".
And that is a dangerous ruling, threatening any and every juror with criminal prosecution for not volunteering what they were not specifically asked. Compelled disclosure of your political beliefs, under threat of criminal punishment, without assistance of counsel, when you are not even asked? That sounds a lot like an inquisition -- confess your sins now or suffer the consequences.
And besides, what this conviction establishes is that courts can exclude from the jury, any juror who understands the historical rights of jurors, and any juror who thinks critically of the government and its laws, and any juror who reserves to themselves the independence of mind to determine what would constitute a just verdict. Following that logic, juries in the 1850's would have been stripped of jurors who thought the Fugitive Slave Act was immoral and unconstitutional, and the Underground Railroad would have helped far fewer slaves escape.
We don't need jury trials if the juries
are intimidated into rubber-stamping the government's point of view. Jurors
have historically been free from intimidation and retaliation for their
deliberations and verdicts, and free from inquiry into their thought processes.
Modern day inquisitions into their
thoughts -- whether during jury selection or after the trial - will destroy
the value of trial by jury.
A thousand years ago, depriving a defendant of a trial by jury was a hanging offense. In 1776, British attacks on jury rights were a major provocation cited in the Declaration of Independence as justification for American Independence.
Laura Kriho's conviction must be reversed.
Paul Grant
Email: pkgrant@ix.netcom.com
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