If I had told you that an African American congresswoman convicted of fraud would obtain en banc review and win in the 11th Circuit by having her conviction vacated, you would tell me that I was crazy and that it was literally a million to one shot. After all, the 11th Circuit is the most conservative appellate court in the country, it grants en banc review to defendants who lose once every decade (at most), and has never ruled for a defendant in an en banc opinion since I've been covering the court. (Please correct me if I'm wrong!). But this wasn't any normal issue before the 11th Circuit. It involved the religious beliefs of a juror who was told by the Holy Spirit to vote not guilty. The district judge struck that juror. Brown was convicted and then appealed. The panel in a 2-1 decision affirmed the conviction (Rosenbaum for the majority and Pryor for the dissent). The en banc court lined up as you would expect it, with the 7 conservative judges saying you can't strike a juror based on a religious vote, while the 4 moderate judges dissented (Jill Pryor recused and did not participate).
You can access the 98 pages of opinions here.
The lineup:
WILLIAM PRYOR, Chief Judge, delivered the opinion of the Court, in which
NEWSOM, BRANCH, GRANT, LUCK, LAGOA, and BRASHER, Circuit
Judges, joined.
NEWSOM, Circuit Judge, filed a concurring opinion, in which GRANT, Circuit
Judge, joined.
BRASHER, Circuit Judge, filed a concurring opinion, in which BRANCH, Circuit
Judge, joined.
WILSON, Circuit Judge, filed a dissenting opinion, in which MARTIN, JORDAN,
and ROSENBAUM, Circuit Judges, joined.
ROSENBAUM, Circuit Judge, filed a dissenting opinion, in which WILSON and
MARTIN, Circuit Judges, joined.
I come out a little different than both camps. I'm fine with a juror voting not guilty based on really whatever they want. In my view, nullification should be permissible. Jurors should be able to say no to the government at a jury trial for whatever reason they wish. But I'm not okay with a conviction based on nullification. In other words, if Satan told a juror to convict even though the evidence was not there, that would be a reason to remove the juror. If the Holy Spirit told a juror to acquit even though there was overwhelming evidence, that should be permitted.
Let's get to the opinions.
From Pryor's introduction:
This appeal requires us to decide whether a district judge abused his
discretion by removing a juror who expressed, after the start of deliberations, that
the Holy Spirit told him that the defendant, Corrine Brown, was not guilty on all
charges. The juror also repeatedly assured the district judge that he was following
the jury instructions and basing his decision on the evidence admitted at trial, and
the district judge found him to be sincere and credible. But the district judge
concluded that the juror’s statements about receiving divine guidance were
categorically disqualifying. Because the record establishes a substantial possibility
that the juror was rendering proper jury service, the district judge abused his
discretion by dismissing the juror. The removal violated Brown’s right under the
Sixth Amendment to a unanimous jury verdict. We vacate Brown’s convictions
and sentence and remand for a new trial.
More:
Juror No. 13’s vernacular that the Holy Spirit “told” him Brown was “not
guilty on all charges” was no more disqualifying by itself than a secular juror’s
statement that his conscience or gut “told” him the same. Of course, neither a
religious nor secular juror may convict or acquit a defendant using his internal
decision-making processes without regard to the evidence. But Juror No. 13
repeatedly explained that he was, in fact, reviewing and deliberating over the
evidence. His statements are not proof that he “abandon[ed] his . . . judgment to
what he . . . perceive[d] to be oracular signs.” DeMille, 756 P.2d at 84. And just as
a juror may say at the beginning of deliberations that he “thinks” a defendant is
“not guilty on all charges,” and perhaps later change his mind, Juror No. 13 could
say that the Holy Spirit “told” him the same without violating his oath.
There is no evidence that Juror No. 13 believed himself unshakably bound to
his initial understanding of the Holy Spirit’s guidance, contrary to the district
judge’s assumption that Juror No. 13’s “religious beliefs compelled him to disregard” the jury instructions. Cf. United States v. Salvador, 740 F.2d 752, 754–
55 (9th Cir. 1984) (affirming declaration of mistrial where juror stopped
deliberating and refused to move from decision made through religious
inspiration). Juror No. 13 may have, for instance, discerned upon further
deliberation and review of the evidence, that his preliminary view was mistaken.
See Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, at 41 (“These evangelical Christians . . .
have to pick out the thoughts that count as God’s and . . . do so in a way that does
not violate the realistic demands of the everyday world.”).
Let us not forget that “[t]he very object of the jury system is to secure
unanimity by a comparison of views, and by arguments among the jurors
themselves.” Allen v. United States, 164 U.S. 492, 501 (1896); see also PeñaRodriguez, 137 S. Ct. at 861 (“[E]xperience shows that fair and impartial verdicts
can be reached if the jury . . . undertakes deliberations that are honest, candid,
robust, and based on common sense.”). We must guard against the removal of a
juror who, in vernacular commonly used by religious and racial minorities,
expresses a view among jurors who “may well come to view the ‘holdout’ . . . not
only as unreasonable, but as unwilling to follow the court’s instructions on the
law.” Thomas, 116 F.3d at 622. And we must take care that judges, “who do not
speak the language of ordinary people and may not understand or appreciate the
way ordinary people live their lives,” Peña-Rodriguez, 137 S. Ct. at 875 (Alito, J., dissenting), do not remove a juror solely because his vernacular led the judge to the
same conclusion. See Obergefell, 135 S. Ct. at 2629 (Scalia, J., dissenting)
(observing the absence of “a single evangelical Christian” on the “select, patrician,
highly unrepresentative panel of nine” that is the Supreme Court).
Newsom is concerned with how the case will be reported:
First, notwithstanding how it will likely be reported, this is not a case about
the single statement, “[T]he Holy Spirit told me . . . that Corrine Brown was not
guilty on all charges”—it’s a case about the context in which that statement was
made and the entire record before us. And the entire record—which the Court
meticulously traces over the course of 14 pages—establishes (at the very least) a
“substantial possibility” that Juror No. 13 was rendering proper jury service, basing
his decision on the evidence. See Maj. Op. at 5–18.
Second, and again notwithstanding how it will likely be reported, this is not
a case about religious jurors—it’s a case about all jurors. It would come out
exactly the same way if Juror No. 13’s comments had touched on some other topic.
See, e.g., United States v. Thomas, 116 F.3d 606, 611, 623–24 (2d Cir. 1997)
(Cabranes, J.) (reversing a district court’s dismissal of a juror who reportedly had
favored acquittal on the ground that “the defendants were his ‘people’” but who
was also said to be discussing and evaluating the evidence).
Brasher says there should have been no inquiry at all here:
I agree with the way the Court applies our precedents to Juror 13’s testimony
about why he preliminarily voted to acquit the defendant. But I write separately to
explain that, in my view, this record should not have been created. There was no
cause for Juror 13 to testify at an evidentiary hearing about his religious convictions,
his view of the evidence, or his understanding of a juror’s role. The trial judge should
not have inquired into Juror 13’s thoughts in the first place.
A juror’s initial view of the case is not what matters.
Wilson dissents:
On the majority’s reading of a cold transcript, there was a substantial
possibility that Juror No. 13 was basing his decision solely on the evidence and the
law. The district court—able to hear live testimony and observe the juror’s tone,
inflection, and demeanor—came to the contrary conclusion. Because the district
court was “uniquely situated” to make this determination, I would not supplant its
judgment with my own. See United States v. Abbell, 271 F.3d 1286, 1303 (11th
Cir. 2001) (per curiam); United States v. Godwin, 765 F.3d 1306, 1316 (11th Cir.
2014).
District judges walk a tightrope when deciding whether to remove a juror
mid-deliberations. A misstep in one direction—improperly removing a holdout
juror—imperils the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a unanimous jury
verdict. A misstep in the opposite direction—allowing a juror to vote without
regard to the merits of the case—undermines each party’s right to a verdict based
on the evidence and threatens the rule of law. See Robinson v. Polk, 444 F.3d 225,
227 (4th Cir. 2006) (mem.) (Wilkinson, J., concurring in the denial of rehearing en
banc) (“Juries have legitimacy in a democracy because, despite the variety of
jurors’ beliefs, they are united in the common endeavor of legal judgment. Any
contrary perception threatens the most basic premise of the rule of law.”).
And Rosenbaum's additional dissent:
Every judge of this Court agrees on this much: the same rule governs
dismissal of both the juror who says his religious authority told him the defendant is
not guilty on all charges and the one who says his religious authority told him the
defendant is guilty on all charges. So let’s be clear about what we’re really doing
today: we are holding that a district judge is powerless to dismiss a juror who, on a
record like this one, says the Holy Spirit told him the defendant is guilty on all
charges and he trusts the Holy Spirit—even though the judge finds after investigation
that the juror is not capable of basing his guilty verdict on the evidence but instead
will base his verdict on what he perceives to be a divine revelation.2
Just think about
that. We are prohibiting district judges, on records like this one, from dismissing jurors they find beyond a reasonable doubt will return a guilty verdict that is not
based on the evidence. Why bother with the trial?
Yet while the Majority Opinion guarantees this result, it invokes the grandeur
of the right to a jury trial, ironically dedicating an entire section to how its decision
protects the rights of defendants to unanimous jury verdicts. See Maj. Op. at Section
III.A. But a unanimous jury’s guilty verdict is worth less than nothing to a convicted
defendant if the jurors who returned the verdict did not base it on the evidence. And
even if only a single juror voted guilty because he believed his religious authority
instructed him to do so, without regard to the evidence, the guilty verdict of the jury
he sat on is not the unanimous verdict our Founders and the Constitution
contemplated; in that case, at best, only eleven jurors, not twelve, based their verdict
on the evidence presented at trial. See Ramos v. Louisiana, 140 S. Ct. 1390, 1395
(2020) (“A verdict, taken from eleven, [is] no verdict at all.”) (internal quotation
marks omitted). So though the Majority Opinion’s take on the Sixth Amendment
right to a unanimous jury verdict may leave a reader with the impression that our
decision today is a soaring eagle, that is but an illusion. Today’s decision is in fact
a skulking serpent: it dooms the Sixth Amendment right to a unanimous jury verdict
in at least some critical circumstances—namely, when a jury returns a guilty verdict
not unanimously based on the evidence.
FN2 To put it in even starker terms, at oral argument, Judge Jordan asked Brown’s counsel
whether the rule the Majority Opinion adopts today would also prevent the district judge from
dismissing a juror who, on a record like this one, says that Satan told him the defendant is guilty
on all charges and he trusts Satan—even if the judge finds after investigation that the juror is not
capable of basing his guilty verdict on the evidence but instead will base it on what he thinks is a
Satanic revelation. Brown’s counsel conceded the rule would preclude the juror’s dismissal. And
not a single judge of this Court disagrees; the same rule must govern whether the juror says he’s
told by the Holy Spirit or by Satan and whether he says he’s told the defendant is not guilty or
guilty on all charges.
