Sunday, April 16, 2017
By Joe Gorman
YOUNGSTOWN
Jurors’ perceptions are key in any criminal case, especially in a capital murder case, an expert on death-penalty law says.
Add intense pretrial publicity, and judges – as well as defense attorneys and prosecutors – will do whatever they can to ensure that a defendant gets a fair trial and that jurors only decide the case and potential penalty based on what they see and hear in the courtroom – not outside of it, said Michael Benza, an instructor of law at Case Western Reserve University who is an authority on death-penalty law.
Decisions such as whether a defendant should be cuffed or shackled not only in a courtroom but also outside in a public space all help to ensure that jurors in a death-penalty case base their decisions solely on what they hear in the courtroom, Benza said.
“It really is a concern that when jurors see certain types of things, it can influence their decision-making process,” Benza said.
Sheriff Jerry Greene said Judge Maureen Sweeney had instructed that Robert Seman not be seen wearing handcuffs or other visible restraints in public areas of the courthouse, in case people in the building may be called to jury duty in the case or see Seman on television. That was designed to avoid giving people a negative impression of the defendant before his trial began.
On Monday, Seman was dressed in civilian clothes and was not handcuffed or shackled as he was walked from the courtroom to an elevator to go to a holding cell in the courthouse before he jumped to his death.
“If you see a person in the courtroom and he’s wearing a prison outfit, you think he’s a bad guy,” Benza said.
Typically, even in death- penalty cases, defendants are not wearing street clothes until jury instruction is actually underway and they are often kept out of sight of jurors at that time in the courthouse.
Seman could have received the death penalty if convicted in the March 30, 2015, deaths of Corinne Gump, 10; and her grandparents, William and Judith Schmidt, in an arson at the home of the Schmidts. But because the case was so highly publicized, Seman had appeared at all of his hearings since his indictment in June 2015 in street clothes. Most pretrial hearings, even in death penalty cases, are not covered by newspapers or television. In the Seman case, the media covered every hearing.
Benza said there is a tendency for people involved in capital cases to do things they wouldn’t do in any other case because of the high stakes and the potential for many years of litigation and appeals.
Benza also addressed how publicity, specifically comments on news stories on social media sites or websites of media outlets, also plays into thinking of both attorneys and a judge during a trial.
Benza said a story about a case could be neutral but the comments from readers could be so inflammatory that they could taint a jury pool. Seman’s case was heavily publicized on the internet and generated heavy comments on social media sites, the majority of those comments against him.
Two attempts to pick a jury locally failed, and Judge Sweeney granted a defense motion to move the trial. She chose Portage County, where jury orientation was to begin last Wednesday.
Several court cases address restraining inmates in front of jurors. The main one is a 1970 case, Illinois v. Allen, where the Supreme Court ruled against a defendant’s motion for a new trial in a robbery case based on the defendant’s argument that he was shackled in front of a jury.
The high court, however, wrote in its opinion: “The presence of restraints tends to erode the presumption of innocence that our system attaches itself to every defendant,” and that quote is cited in almost all cases where appeals are made based on defendants who are visibly restrained before jurors.
The high court cited this opinion in a 2004 case, Deck v. Missouri, where a man sentenced to death appealed his sentence because he argued he was shackled in front of jurors during the penalty phase of his murder trial. The high court wrote that having defendants appear without shackles is a practice that dates back to English common law and they can only be used if a “special need” arises.
In the Deck case, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the defendant’s death sentence and sent the case back to the lower court for resentencing.