Tucson, Arizona Monday, 18 November 2002
http://www.azstarnet.com/star/today/21118nanonymousjuries.html
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Wisconsin Supreme Court will soon decide whether Sherrie S. Tucker is so dangerous that her case required an anonymous jury.
Tucker would not strike most people as particularly scary. When she was arrested on cocaine charges in 1998, she was 16 years old and six months pregnant. She was just over 4 feet tall and weighed 90 pounds.
The trial judge, Emily S. Mueller of Racine County Circuit Court, said it was her practice in all drug cases to refer to jurors by number rather than name because they might be subject to reprisals from dealers.
Mueller and other Wisconsin judges who share her philosophy are not alone in using anonymous juries in everyday cases. Begun 25 years ago in a notorious drug case in New York to guard against jury tampering, the practice has spread in state and federal courts, sometimes in cases that are quite routine.
It has gained support from prosecutors, the courts and some legal experts. No longer is the rationale simply that jurors must be shielded from threats of retaliation. Supporters argue that anonymity protects jurors from being badgered by the news media after their verdicts and makes them feel more comfortable about serving.
Critics, including defense lawyers and civil libertarians, say the practice erodes the presumption of innocence before the trial begins. Lawyers for news organizations add that the inability to interview jurors after trials makes juries less accountable.
Anonymous juries have been used in the trials of the Branch Davidians, of the police officers accused of assaulting Rodney King and Abner Louima, and of John Gotti, O.J. Simpson and Oliver North. They have been used in a case involving the killing of a doctor who performed abortions, in the trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers and in countless narcotics and organized-crime cases.
Increasingly, they are being used in more mundane cases.
The primary cost of the procedure, critics say, is in the harm it does to the presumption of innocence.
"An anonymous jury raises the specter that the defendant is a dangerous person from whom jurors must be protected, thereby implicating the defendant's constitutional right to a presumption of innocence," the federal appeals court in Atlanta wrote in 1994.
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