Dictionaries are considered evidence in death penalty trials?
From an article on Wired News:
The judge in Zacarias Moussaoui’s death penalty trial admonished the jury Friday to avoid dictionaries after learning a juror looked up the meaning of “aggravating.”
[…]
Deliberations halted briefly Friday after the court learned that a juror had turned to a dictionary _ which U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema had refused to supply the jury earlier in the week when asked.[…]
[…]
Earlier in the week, Brinkema denied the jury’s request for a dictionary, saying that to supply them would be like placing extraneous evidence in jury room.
Wow.. So a dictionary is evidence in a death penalty trial?
What if a juror is not the most educated, or they’re ESL?
It seems to me that a dictionary is one of the few resources they SHOULD have available to them.
I can understand not allowing jurors to watch the news, read a magazine, Google search, etc. But from what I’ve seen (mostly TV/movies) of legal/courtroom stuff, lawyers (when addressing the jury) seem to often say things like “[SomeEvilCrime] is defined as …”, since precise wording and language is extremely important in legal proceedings.
In the judge’s defense, she did verbally provide a definition of “aggravating” to the jury, and apparently the jury’s instructions already included a definition for “aggravating factors”, and the juror should not have used a dictionary after specifically having been told not to.
It just seems silly that a dictionary could be considered “extraneous evidence” in a death penalty trial (unless that dictionary had been used as a weapon to kill someone (some editions are awfully big and heavy!)).
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June 20th, 2006 at 8:36 am
That’s ridiculous.