Religion has no place in jury rooms

By LINDA P. CAMPBELL

Despite his given name, Khristian Oliver was not heartened to learn that jurors in Nacogdoches consulted their Bibles in the room where they decided to sentence him to death.

Several of them read Numbers 35:16-19, which says, “And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death.”

It might be easy to say that Oliver deserved Death Row for shooting Joe Collins in the course of a 1998 home robbery then smashing his head with a rifle butt while he lay in his front yard.

Trouble is, what the Scripture-reading jurors did by bringing their Bibles into the deliberations violated the Constitution.

It’s not that the courts and the law don’t respect religion. Passing judgment as a community representative naturally involves both intellectual assessment and moral evaluation. Jurors aren’t expected to check their conscience at the door.

Evidence

But juries are supposed to base their verdict solely on the evidence presented in court and the law as provided by the judge, without outside influence. That’s part of the Sixth Amendment’s “impartial jury” guarantee.

Jurors are told their obligation going in, and they take an oath faithfully to follow their instructions as part of their conscientious service.

In fact, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the jurors who sentenced Oliver had “crossed an important line” by referring to Bible passages that weren’t part of the law and evidence in the case.

“Most circuits have ruled that when a Bible itself enters the jury room, the jury has been exposed to an external influence,” Judge Edward Prado wrote in an August ruling. “Here, we face facts that are even more egregious than in those previous cases.”

The Bible, he wrote, “may have influenced the jurors” in a way that would “ensure a sentence of death instead of conducting a thorough inquiry into these factual areas.”

It’s mystifying then that the appellate court upheld Oliver’s sentence, citing the trial judge’s conclusion that “a conscientious, dedicated and carrying (sic) jury” had reached its verdict “uninfluenced by any outside influence of any kind.”

How could that be, when they were reading their Bibles in the jury room? How could the appeals court say they shouldn’t have been, but never mind, harmless error?

Oliver’s lawyers have asked the Supreme Court to set the lower courts right on Bibles in the jury room. And it’s time the justices did.

Courts all over the country have had to rule on the issue, and they don’t necessarily come to the same result.

In an exercise in twisted logic, the Texas attorney general’s office wants the high court to reject Oliver’s petition precisely because the appeals courts aren’t all on the same page about whether jurors consulting Scripture violates the Constitution.

The issue “has the very real potential to deeply affect jury deliberations in virtually every single trial, civil and criminal, across the nation,” the AG’s brief acknowledges. But it also argues that Oliver “has presented the wrong question at the wrong time” and that his claim “lacks merit.”

Besides that, the state contends, the court should wait for a case where its ruling would make a difference.

In other words, the AG believes that Oliver would have been convicted and sentenced to death even if the jurors hadn’t brought in extraneous material, so even a constitutional violation doesn’t matter.

Constitutional rights

But don’t constitutional rights always matter? Surely they don’t only matter in a case where the defendant can prove he’s actually innocent?

The AG’s arguments contain a certain amount of legal contortionism, supporting the 5th Circuit’s result while arguing that the appeals court “overstated the reach of existing Supreme Court precedent on this subject.”

There’s no denying that Oliver did a stupid, senseless, vicious thing. But if Texas wants to kill him for it, the state and its representatives should have to follow the most fundamental constitutional rules, not just the ones they like.

X Linda P. Campbell is a columnist and editorial writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.