9.Objection to Pretrial-Publicity References in Defense Closing
21 linesMR. KRATZ: Judge, I'm going to interpose an objection. He is commenting on pre-trial or out of court statements, whether by counsel or by other witnesses. That is absolutely improper. That is not a common experience that they bring to the courtroom.
THE COURT: All right. Just a second, I'm going to excuse the jury for a couple minutes.
(Jury not present.)
THE COURT: You may be seated.
MR. BUTING: Judge, I'm actually bringing this up only to show them, and my next explanation would be how important it is not to leap to a quick judgment and why it's so important that they disregard all of that kind of information they may have heard before and focus on the evidence in this case. That's where I'm going with this.
THE COURT: Okay. I wasn't sure from the introduction comment if you were going to refer to any information that was not introduced as evidence. As I understand it, you are telling me you are not.
MR. BUTING: That's correct. That's all I intend to say about it.
THE COURT: Mr. Kratz.
MR. KRATZ: When he starts with, unfortunately, you were exposed to information, he is pre-supposing, first of all, that they know that.
Secondly, Mr. Strang and Mr. Buting, in jury selection, referred in great detail to out of court statements in this particular case.
But, third, and most importantly, the jury has already been instructed not to consider anything that was outside the courtroom. So to highlight some -- something they may have heard on the news, or something earlier, is absolutely improper and I'm suggesting that Mr. Buting knows that.
MR. BUTING: I disagree. This jury was exposed to false, misleading information for months. And it's not until they came into this courtroom that they heard the other side. That's the point -- this is the best example I can think of on why a case has to be decided and tried in the courtroom.
The Court's instructed them. We talked about it in voir dire. We couldn't ignore the fact that at least three of these jurors who are sitting here today came in saying, I think he's guilty. They promised to put it aside, but that's all I'm doing is reminding them of that.
THE COURT: One of the problems, as I recall, is that the jurors, and I don't have each individual juror's answer committed to memory, but it's my understanding that they were exposed to pre-trial publicity in varying degrees. For the most part we wound up with jurors who weren't as exposed to the publicity as some others. But I also agree that we do not have a jury composed completely of people who were not exposed to any pre-trial publicity.
I'm a little concerned that, even the reference to publicity, for the same reasons I expressed as one of the reasons for dismissing the false imprisonment charge is, references to it could possibly lead the jurors to talking about it in deliberations and that's something that I don't think we want.
MR. BUTING: I agree. And that's as far as I was going with it. I wasn't going to draw any more references to it, other than to remind them how I think this is the best example, now that they have been through the process, to understand why it is so important for them to only judge the case on the facts, not speculating.
THE COURT: All right. I'm going to ask you -- you can refer to speculation, but I'm going to ask you to phrase it in some other way that doesn't involve referring to pre-trial publicity, in order to avoid the problems with it.
MR. BUTING: That's fine. I will just finish by saying, that this case is an example of why you can't leap to quick judgments and why you should base your decision on the evidence in court.
THE COURT: That's fine. Anything else, Mr. Kratz?
MR. KRATZ: I'm not sure how to un-ring that bell, Judge.
MR. BUTING: Well, I wish I could un-ring it too.
THE COURT: Both parties have made arguments about un-ringing bells. I don't think the comments that have been made thus far get us significantly into that problem to require corrective action. So as long as there's not going to be a reference -- any further reference to any pre-trial publicity, lets bring the jurors back and allow Mr. Buting to continue.
MR. BUTING: Thank you.
(Jury present.)
THE COURT: You may be seated. Members of the jury, we're hoping that our sound problems are related to a bad battery, so the battery is being replaced. In a minute, we'll resume.