New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously ruledthat jurors may not testify about what went on during deliberations even to expose dishonesty during jury selection.

The case, Warger v. Shauers, No. 13-517, arose from a collision between a truck and a motorcycle in South Dakota in which the rider lost part of his leg. The rider sued and lost.

Not long after the trial, a former juror told the rider’s lawyer that the jury’s forewoman, Regina Whipple, had seemed biased in favor of the truck driver.

According to the juror, Ms. Whipple said during deliberations that her daughter had also been responsible for a fatal accident. “She related,” the juror said in a sworn statement, “that if her daughter had been sued, it would have ruined her life.” (Ms. Whipple has disputed the juror’s account.)

The injured rider sought a new trial based on the juror’s statement, saying Ms. Whipple should have revealed her daughter’s experience during jury selection. But lower courts refused to consider the statement, relying on Supreme Court precedents and a federal rule of evidence that bars most testimony from jurors “during an inquiry into the validity of a verdict.”

Tuesday’s decision, the first one issued in an argued case this term, was written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She said the federal rule “applies to any proceeding in which the jury’s verdict might be invalidated, including efforts to demonstrate that a juror lied” during jury selection.

She said that courts had taken differing approaches to the sanctity of jury deliberations but that Congress had instructed federal courts to bar the use of almost all evidence from jury deliberations, with very narrow exceptions.

One of those exceptions is for evidence of “extraneous prejudicial information.” Justice Sotomayor said the forewoman’s life experiences did not qualify.

“Whipple’s daughter’s accident may well have informed her general views about negligence liability for car crashes,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “but it did not provide either her or the rest of the jury with any specific knowledge regarding” the collision at issue in the case before them.

Justice Sotomayor wrote that Tuesday’s decision was supported by a 1987 Supreme Court ruling that had refused to consider evidence that jurors had been drunk during trial. Other decisions cited in that case, Justice Sotomayor wrote, had refused to consider evidence from inside the jury room concerning “jurors’ insanity, inability to understand English and hearing impairments.”

She said there were other ways to root out dishonest jurors. “Juror impartiality is adequately assured,” she wrote, “by the parties’ ability to bring to the court’s attention any evidence of bias before the verdict is rendered, and to employ nonjuror evidence even after the verdict is rendered.”

Justice Sotomayor did seem to carve out one issue indirectly implicated by the case, suggesting that cases involving racial bias might require a different result.

“There may be cases of juror bias so extreme that, almost by definition, the jury trial right has been abridged,” she wrote in a footnote. “If and when such a case arises, the court can consider whether the usual safeguards are or are not sufficient to protect the integrity of the process.”