Lawyer: Call of deer to sap pool of jurors
Posted on Thursday, September 14, 2006
Because a jury box lacks the allure of a deer stand, the attorney for a bail bondsman charged in a Lonoke County criminal case says his client’s trial should be postponed from its Nov. 8 start.
Deer season — the one for hunters bearing modern rifles and shotguns — begins three days later in Arkansas.
“Potentially 10 percent or more of the jurors [could be ] excluded from jury duty because they would rather be hunting than stuck in a courtroom in Cabot,” Little Rock attorney John Wesley Hall Jr. argued in a motion filed Wednesday in Lonoke County Circuit Court.
Deer hunting doesn’t pass muster as a valid excuse from jury duty, but that didn’t faze Hall.
“Some will be direct and admit it, but others will not,” he wrote of potential jurors. “It will show up in other excuses from jury duty, or they will just refuse to show up.” If the trial were to last just a few days, it wouldn’t matter, Hall said. But his client, Bobby Junior Cox, faces a “mega trial” that would keep jurors, some of them pining for a 10-point buck, penned up in a courtroom for several weeks, Hall said.
Cox and four others are accused of operating a “continuing criminal organization” involving illegal drugs, illicit sex and abuse of an inmate-labor program. Codefendants include the former Lonoke police chief, the chief’s wife and another bail bondsman.
Eliminating an entire cross section of the population would make it difficult to seat an impartial jury, Hall said.
“It’s always a concern, every November in every county outside of Pulaski County,” the attorney said of court cases conflicting with deer season.
Hall’s argument is a novel one, said Bob Rush, the circuit clerk in Ashley County.
“There is no county in Arkansas that hunts deer more than Ashley County, and we’ve never seen that,” said Rush, referring to a motion to push back a court case because of deer season.
Indeed, the southeast Arkansas county accounted for one of the highest numbers of deer harvests during the 2004-05 hunting season, Arkansas Game and Fish Commission statistics show.
Prosecuting Attorney David Gibbons of Clarksville, who is president of the Arkansas Prosecuting Attorneys Association, said he, too, had never encountered such a legal maneuver.
“That is unique in my experience,” Gibbons said, laughing. “I’ve never seen that motion.” Jeff Rosenzweig, an attorney for Larry Norwood, the other bondsman charged along with Cox, recalled his involvement in a 1988 capital-murder trial in Arkansas County that was postponed because it fell during deer season.
“The trial judge moved the trial twice — once because the county was out of money and didn’t have money to pay the jurors,” Rosenzweig said, but the second delay came because the judge figured it would be difficult to seat a jury during deer season. “As it was, several jurors showed up for trial in camo.” Arkansas has an estimated 300, 000 deer hunters each year, said Keith Stephens, assistant chief of communications for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. That represents a little more than 10 percent of the state’s population of roughly 2. 8 million.
Lonoke County, where the trial of Cox and others is scheduled, has a population of roughly 60, 000 — and 6, 735 of them are licensed to hunt big game, including deer, according to commission statistics.
“It’s just a big thing in Arkansas. It’s a huge tradition,” Stephens said of deer hunting. “People mark it on their calendar and they schedule everything around it.” Tales abound in rural Arkansas of classrooms nearly emptying before the opening weekend of modern-gun deer season, he said.
“People plan their vacations around it.... They look at it for when to schedule their weddings,” Stephens said. “They’re sure not going to do it during deer season.” But postponing a trial ?
“That’s a new one for me.”
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