Jury selection needs reform

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Updated: February 26, 2012 8:17AM

Late Tuesday, U.S. District Judge James Zagel put an end — for now — to the latest flap over whether a juror’s failure to disclose her criminal background had unfairly tainted a high-profile federal conviction.

But Zagel’s finding that Illinois Republican powerhouse William Cellini is not entitled to a new trial won’t resolve the underlying problem of how far the courts should go in investigating jurors and how to avoid ending up in the same pickle again.

Zagel rejected arguments from Cellini’s lawyers he did not get a fair trial because juror Candy Chiles had “repeatedly lied” about her background during jury selection.

Siding with prosecutors, Zagel said Chiles’ answers during jury selection “were not deliberate lies, most were not lies at all.” Rather, he characterized them as “mostly mistakes or inadvertent errors.”

In essence, Zagel said that if he knew everything then that he knows now about Chiles’ past, he still would not have dismissed her from the jury.

What defense attorneys say they had a right to know during jury selection was that Chiles was a two-time convicted felon with at least three arrests.

These included Chiles being sentenced to 18 months probation after pleading guilty to felony charges relating to a 1999 arrest for possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine. In 2008, she was arrested for an aggravated DUI, pled guilty and served 44 days in jail.

Chiles was tripped up by a jury questionnaire that asked: “Have you ever been convicted, either by your guilty or nolo contendere plea or by a court or jury trial, of a state or federal crime for which punishment could have been more than one year in prison?”

She filled in the “No” box.

Then she answered “Yes” to this question: “Have you or a family member ever been arrested OR convicted of a crime?” In the space left to explain, she wrote: “A DUI.”

But when asked in court by the judge whether the DUI referred to her or someone else, Chiles said, “someone else.”

“A relative of yours?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

After Cellini was found guilty, Chiles’ criminal record was disclosed by the Chicago Tribune.

Without going into all the explanations Chiles later gave the court, I’d say that while you can see how she could have been confused by the legalistic language of the questionnaire, her answers were less than forthcoming and deliberately so.

Still, I don’t think she had any interest in infiltrating the Cellini jury, and there’s certainly nothing to suggest she had a bias against him, even if she did display an open hostility toward his lawyer, Dan Webb, when he hauled her into court to explain.

Webb argued her bias must be presumed because of her dishonest answers.

The situation is uncomfortably parallel to the 2006 trial of former Gov. George Ryan, when two jurors were removed in the middle of deliberations for failing to disclose their arrest records. Their backgrounds also became public through media reports. Webb was a lawyer in that case, too, and the juror problems became an issue on appeal.

Cellini sat at the defense table with a glum expression as he listened to Zagel read his ruling, the direction it was taking becoming apparent long before the judge was finished.

Instead of looking at Zagel, Cellini stared straight ahead or at the floor, and I got the feeling he’d held out some real hope the judge might see it his way this one time.

Afterward, Cellini and Webb hustled out of the courthouse without speaking to reporters. But Webb has already stated his intention to appeal the conviction on other grounds and surely will add this to it.

While federal prosecutors kept it poker-faced, you’ve got to believe there was a little sigh of relief back in their offices.

As I’ve said previously, if knowing the criminal history of jurors is so important, then it’s worth making an actual background check beforehand instead of relying on their truthfulness and second-guessing them afterward.

This whole business of investigating jurors is leading us down a slippery slope.