by Frank Kundrat
District Court Judge
I have presided over numerous civil and criminal jury trials since becoming a judge almost eight years ago. These trials have lasted anywhere from one day to four weeks. They have involved various crimes, such as attempted murder, drug trafficking and robbery, as well as civil disputes involving personal injury, medical malpractice, auto accidents and a variety of other human disputes.
One common thread runs throughout all of these jury trials: unexpected surprises frequently occur.
Humor sometimes raises its head during jury selection. In one case I conducted, one of the attorneys was questioning the jurors as to their various backgrounds and suitability for sitting on that particular case. One of the jurors questioned was a rather prim-looking elderly woman. The attorney asked the woman whether she was married or single.
“I’m divorced!” she shot back at the attorney.
The attorney, attempting to recover from the abrupt answer given by the woman, asked, “Well…what did your ex-husband do?”
She shot back, “Not near enough!”
At the start of another trial I had, the jury was screened and selected and the first witness was called. As the witness took the stand, a hand shot up from the jury box. I asked the juror what her question was, and the juror replied she happened to know the witness personally. I asked the juror how come she didn’t tell us that during the jury selection process when I read the list of witnesses’ names to the jury and asked if they recognized any of them.
The juror said, “Well, I know his face but I didn’t know his name!”
That juror had to be dismissed as being disqualified to serve. Fortunately, we had an alternate juror to serve in her place.
In the midst of a criminal trial I presided over, I was suddenly approached by one of the court bailiffs to tell me a person in the visitors’ gallery sitting fairly near the jury was making snide comments about the testimony of some of the witnesses. I had not heard any such comments but quickly had to recess the trial and call each juror out individually to sit on the witness stand and testify under oath whether or not they had heard any of the remarks. Fortunately, none had, but it took up a lot of valuable trial time. The snide commenter was summarily expelled from the courtroom.
In another trial of mine, an attorney was showing an exhibit to the court and jury. The exhibit happened to be a large grimy-looking piece of a plastic liner from a farm manure pit. The exhibit appeared to still bear the dried remains of whatever was dumped onto it previously at the dairy farm. The attorney, after having the exhibit admitted into evidence, asked the court for permission to have it passed among all the jury members for personal examination. The jurors immediately shot a glance of dread at me about handling the offensive-looking object. I instructed the attorney to have the item cleaned off before handing it to the jury as there was no “evidence” on the exhibit that needed preservation for the purposes of that trial. All the jurors immediately let out a sigh of relief.
Trial work is one of the most interesting and demanding aspects of my job as a judge. The unpredictable twists and turns of life are frequently borne out in the real-life human drama called a jury trial.
Judge Frank Kundrat is a Minnesota State District Court judge with chambers in St. Cloud.
