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State v. Mann6/6/2000
ormation he presented to the jury. "In my professional judgment . . . looking at this from engineering problem, this whole scenario with screwdriver on top of a hamper ultimately impaling a kid, there's a sequence that has to occur in some form or fashion for that to happen." The juror then went through his own five-step probability calculations that apparently took about thirty minutes. By the juror's own admission, none of that information was presented during the trial and was available to him only because of his background in engineering and physics. Apparently, Juror No. 7 felt compelled to present his probability calculations to the other jurors because he concluded that the "right question" was not asked.
The trial court interviewed only five of the twelve jurors and, although the court did not make an explicit finding that extraneous information was presented to the jury, it did find that at least the five jurors interviewed did not rely upon any extraneous material in reaching their decision. The trial court stated, "I believe that the jury in this case took the evidence as they saw it in court, made a decision based on their [conscience] and on the evidence presented in court." (Emphasis added.) It is not clear from the court's ruling whether it found that extraneous material had actually reached the jury but concluded in any event that Defendant was not prejudiced or whether the court determined that, even assuming such material reached the jury, Defendant was not prejudiced. Whichever determination on the first prong was made by the trial court, it clearly found no prejudice to Defendant.
In my view, whether the trial court actually found the information provided by Juror No. 7 to constitute extraneous material is not controlling. Having reviewed the information presented by Juror No. 7, in view of the principles enunciated by our Supreme Court in Sacoman, I would conclude, as a matter of law, that the information indeed constituted extraneous material. Specifically, it was information that would not otherwise be available to the jury and constituted a " ommunication of specific knowledge from a particular juror to others." Sacoman, 107 N.M. at 590, 762 P.2d at 252; see also Shamalon Bird, 111 N.M. at 715, 809 P.2d at 629 (describing what constitutes expert testimony); Steinkraus, 76 N.M. at 620, 417 P.2d at 432 (stating that expert testimony is to be considered evidence).
The majority poses the issue as whether a juror's reliance on his technical background, as well as his communication of this reliance to fellow jurors, constitutes misconduct. I submit that what transpired in the jury room in this case was beyond communication relying on technical background. What occurred here was the bringing into the jury room of the juror's own calculations based on his specialized knowledge, as well as his version of responses to questions that he maintained were never asked of the sole expert witness who testified on the subject at trial. It matters not that Juror No. 7 based his own calculations upon the testimony of Dr. Watts or other facts adduced at trial. See Alford v. Drum, 68 N.M. 298, 302, 361 P.2d 451, 453 (1961) (acknowledging that expert testimony is often based on facts already in the record). What matters is that, in using these facts, which in themselves were not extrinsic, to perform his own calculations and then proceeding to explain those calculations by using his own five-step process, independent of Dr. Watts' testimony, Juror No. 7 presented extraneous material. It also is not significant, as maintained by the majority, whether the juror's own calculations discredited Dr. Watts' testimony on the likelihood or probability of the impaling o
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