The U.S. court system is 100% broken, and nothing shows that fact better than this case out of Pennsylvania.
Safon Gump was accused of fatally shooting Gregory Prince, but the trial that would have brought justice to Gump derailed because one of the jurors got high in the jury room.
TribLive has the details:
Because Gump remains in custody — and court rules prohibit jurors from seeing a defendant in handcuffs for fear it could prejudice them — jurors were returned to their fifth-floor room to await the all clear to leave for lunch.
When Common Pleas Judge Edward J. Borkowski’s tipstaff arrived to release the jurors, Seman said, ‘He’s immediately hit with the smell of marijuana.’
Then, one of the jurors ‘looked at him and said, ‘It wasn’t me.”‘
This is where things really went off the rails.
The prosecution and the defense both agreed that if the juror had a prescription it was fine, and the judge said no one would be in trouble for the incident, but all the jurors also swore that they were not taking any medications that could affect their judgment in the case, so the judge needed to figure out who it was.
One by one, the jurors were brought to the judge’s chambers privately and questioned.
They all answered no in chambers, as well.
The judge also asked the jurors if anyone had ingested anything legally or illegally while in the jury room.
‘All of them denied it,’ Seman said.
The defense asked for a mistrial and the judge agreed to it.