Attorney Wood recently assembled a tremendous team from Wilmer Cutler Picker Hale and Dorr and the Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Institute for an important amicus brief arguing that seeks to extend protections against racial bias in jury deliberations. Specifically, the brief argues that the Supreme Judicial Court should extend the obligation of the trial judge to investigate credible allegations of racial bias in jury deliberations beyond previous holdings to require that the trial judge conduct individual voir dire of all deliberating jurors to determine whether any expression of bias during deliberations has affected their ability to be fair and impartial.
Amicus Brief Helps Convince SJC to Require Inquiry Into Racist Juror Comments
In Commonwealth v. Ralph R (November 10, 2022), Attorney Wood on behalf of MACDL and Sara Silva of Hogan Lovells on behalf of the Center for Juvenile Justice, the New England Innocence Project, and the Korematsu Center for Law and Equality submitted an amicus brief that helped convince the Supreme Judicial Court to clarify that if there is any basis to suspect racial bias in jury deliberations, the trial judge has an independent duty to make an adequate inquiry to address the issue. Here, a juror reported during trial that “discriminating comments” were made. But the judge simply shrugged it off, saying “I have no idea” what the juror meant. The SJC made clear that the judge had an obligation to figure out what the juror meant, rather than turn a blind eye.