Trustworthy Plumbers

In a split decision, the Court of Appeals ruled that Vince gets a new trial.

“No admonition or instruction could have cured the prejudice that resulted from the trial court’s statement that it believed a plumber would lie in court, when [Vince]’s alibi witness was a plumber who the prosecution argued came to court to lie for his friend,” the court held. The judge’s disparagement of plumbers, essentially telling the jury that all plumbers are liars, combined with the prosecutor’s argument that Vince’s alibi witness was indeed lying, unduly influenced the jurors and took away their responsibility to decide who was telling the truth in the trial. The majority said that the trial judge should have either declared a mistrial or at least dismissed the jury panel and started over with a new, untainted group. Just telling the jurors to forget her comment about plumbers would have not have undone the damage. “Under these circumstances an instruction would have been as ineffectual as the famous words spoken by the Wizard of Oz, ‘Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!’”

The dissenting Justice agreed that “the trial judge should not have shared her personal anecdote about plumbers during jury voir dire.” He disagreed, however, that “the jurors could have reasonably understood the court’s statements to mean that plumbers are liars or that jurors should not believe them.” He thought that the jurors would not have remembered what the judge said when the witness said he was a plumber, and that the standard instruction telling the jury not to consider anything the judge did or said to indicated how they should decide the case erased any prejudice that might have arisen from the judge’s comment.

Unlike the majority, the dissenting Justice also thought it significant that Vince’s attorney decided not to have the judge tell the jury to disregard the plumber comment. He would not have rescued Vince from his attorney’s tactical decision.

People v. Tatum, decided October 3, 2016.