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Guoth v. Hamilton5/25/2005
rs, however, must be free from bias and prejudice regarding the trial's outcome. And as recently established by our Supreme Court, a trial court cannot rehabilitate a biased juror simply by asking a talismanic question, such as whether the juror can set aside his personal feelings and decide the case based solely on the evidence and the law. In other words, a court may not cut off inquiry and rely on an affirmative answer to a rehabilitative question from the bench as a talisman to show that the juror has magically, suddenly become unbiased and impartial. Nor may counsel or the trial court browbeat the juror into affirmative answers to rehabilitative questions by using multiple, leading questions. The court instead must conduct an inquiry, either through its own questioning or allowance of questions by counsel, sufficient to evaluate the potential juror's fairness and impartiality. A trial court has broad discretion in making this evaluation, and we will not reverse its ruling absent a manifest abuse of discretion.
(Punctuation and footnotes omitted.)
Doss v. State applied these principles. In that case, the defendant was accused of child molestation, and the juror in question had been molested as a child and harbored prejudices against men who engaged in such conduct. In upholding the trial court's decision not to excuse the juror there, Doss emphasized that the court's questioning was not coercive and that unlike cases where the jurors had to be excused, the juror "did not know any of the parties to the case, had no personal knowledge of the facts, and did not indicate anything other than a general dislike of a particular type of act." (Punctuation omitted.) Id. at 212 (4). Even so, we advised that granting the motion to strike "would have been the better practice." Id. at 213 (4). See Powell v. Amin ("the better practice is for judges simply to use their discretion to remove such partial jurors, even when the question of a particular juror's impartiality is a very close call").
Here the prospective juror did know one of the parties from working at the same hospital with him. See Walls v. Kim, supra at 260 (juror knew defendant doctor from working at same hospital with him). Fellow employees, with whom she worked regularly, had poisoned her mind regarding the facts of this particular case, having told her that Dr. Guoth had "messed up" Hamilton's urethra in his treatment of her. See Torres v. State (extra-judicial knowledge about facts of case may bias juror). She also indicated more than a general dislike for the acts of medical malpractice at issue. She plainly stated that she not only would not allow her family to be treated by Dr. Guoth, but in describing what she had heard regarding his medical treatment of a female patient without proper sterility precautions, she used the words "rammed his hand up in her," showing her unabashed disdain for his medical techniques. It is hardly surprising that when the general question was posed to all jurors whether they could act fairly and impartially, she immediately volunteered that she had misgivings about her ability to do so. Only after repeated leading questions from the plaintiff's attorney and from the court did she eventually say that she could try to be impartial; even so, she conceded that she was starting with the understanding that Dr. Guoth had done something wrong.
This case is analogous to Kier v. State, supra, in which the trial court failed to strike from the jury panel a corrections officer who worked at the facility where the defendant was incarcerated for the very charges being tried. We reversed, holding:
The nature of this prospective juror's duties as an employee of the jail in which [the d
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