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State v. Fortin2/3/2004
ciousness. And, in a bizarre and unique kind of attack, he bit her on the left breast. And he bit her on the chin. And... he forced something into her anus that caused the flesh to lacerate.
After the State's opening, the court gave a limiting instruction to the effect that the Maine evidence could only be considered in determining the identity of Padilla's killer, and that it could not be considered as evidence that defendant was "a bad person, with a propensity for committing bad acts." The late timing of the disclosure and the limiting instruction, however, already had denied the court and the parties the opportunity to learn whether the sixteen sworn jurors would have answered any of the voir dire questions differently had they known that they were to receive evidence of defendant's sexual assault on Trooper Gardner.
B.
Our State and Federal Constitutions guarantee the right to trial by an impartial jury. U.S. Const. amends. VI, XIV; N.J. Const. art. I, 10. " n impartial jury is a necessary condition to a fair trial" in our constitutional framework.
State v. Williams, 113 N.J. 393, 409 (1988) (Williams II) (citing Sheppard v. Maxwell, 384 U.S. 333, 362-63, 86 S.Ct. 1507, 1522-23, 16 L.Ed. 2d 600, 620 (1966)). Jurors, therefore, must be "as nearly impartial as the lot of humanity will admit." State v. Williams, 93 N.J. 39, 60 (1983) (Williams I) (internal quotation marks omitted). The "requirement of fairness 23af and particularly jury impartiality 23af is heightened in cases in which the defendant faces death." Id. at 61. A trial is poisoned at its inception if the jurors deciding the case cannot review the evidence dispassionately, through the light of reason.
The trial court's duty "to take all appropriate measures to ensure the fair and proper administration of a criminal trial" must begin with voir dire. Id. at 62. A "vital aspect" of that responsibility is to ensure the impaneling of only impartial jurors by ferreting out potential and latent juror biases. Id. at 62-63, 68. To carry out that task, a thorough voir dire "should probe the minds of the prospective jurors to ascertain whether they hold biases that would interfere with their ability to decide the case fairly and impartially." State v. Erazo, 126 N.J. 112, 129 (1991). Although a trial court's exercise of its broad discretionary powers in conducting voir dire "will ordinarily not be disturbed on appeal," Williams II, supra, 113 N.J. at 410 (internal quotation marks omitted), we have not hesitated to correct mistakes that undermine the very foundation of a fair trial 23af the selection of an impartial jury.
In this case, the other-crime evidence was not only the most critical component of the State's case, but the evidence most likely to inflame a jury and render it incapable of reasoned analysis. It may very well be that some jurors, given the shocking nature of the attack on Trooper Gardner, would have been incapable of honoring the court's limiting instruction and would have presumed guilt based on that crime alone. That concern was more than a theoretical possibility. Two prospective jurors who read accounts of defendant's crime in Maine confided to the trial court that they would be incapable of rendering a fair verdict.
The trial court claimed that it was carrying out the mandate of Manley, supra, by rejecting defendant's proposed voir dire questions. 54 N.J. 259. We, therefore, first look to Manley to determine whether the court, in exercising its discretion, was true to the holding of that case. In Manley, the defendant, who was on trial for non-capital murder, sought to query prospective jurors about their reactions to his prior conviction for atroci
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