Nevada Supreme Court: Trial Judge can't change verdict to guilty
Today’s Nevada Supreme Court opinions included two civil and two criminal cases.
I discuss the criminal cases here, and the civil cases in the next post.
In Knipes v. State, the Nevada Supreme Court held that, in criminal trials, hearings to determine the admissibility of juror questions should be conducted on the record. However, failure to properly administerr such hearings is reviewable under a harmless error standard. In the Knipes trial, the hearings were not on the record, but since the juror questions asked did not result in any prejudicial testimony, the error was harmless.
In Davidson v. State, the Nevada Supreme Court held that a judge cannot change a jury’s verdict from not guilty to guilty for a criminal charge based on a purported clerical error after the jury has been discharged.
Yeah, okay, this one tempts me to say “duh.”
But hey, it is slightly more complicated than that. I mean, they’d convicted the guy of burglary and battery, so why not robbery, too? And besides, ten of the twelve jurors were still around and, even though they’d previously agreed in open court that the verdict as read was accurate, after the prosecutor spoke to them, they all agreed that they really meant to convict the guy on another charge too.
And yes, now I am giggling.
Apparently we have a 9th Circuit case to blame for this one -- United States v. Stauffer, 922 F. 2d 508 (9th Cir. 1990). But in that case, all the court did was switch the specific extortion case upon which the jury had convicted from one to the other. In other words, no additional conviction added.
The Court also ruled that where one of the underlying convictions for the “small habitual criminal” statute is actually a misdemeanor, sentencing the defendant as an habitual offender was plain error.
Long, long ago, I was a staff attorney at an appellate court, drafting opinions for criminal cases. Those were the days....
