Peterson juror was ‘average person’ and not woman with agenda, prosecutors say
A juror who served on Scott Peterson’s murder trial was “an average person doing her civic duty,” prosecutors said in a document filed Friday in response to his appeal that claimed juror misconduct.
“She completed a 20-page questionnaire of 116 questions, and she did so to the best of her ability, having a high school education,” Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager and Assistant District Attorney Dave Harris wrote in a response filed in San Mateo Superior Court, where Peterson was convicted in 2004. “That the breadth of her vocabulary is different from a person who has been to college, three years of law school, passed the bar examination and spent their career in the legal field, should surprise no one.”
Peterson’s habeas appeal claimed juror Richelle Nice wished “in part to punish him for a crime of harming his unborn child – a crime that she personally experienced when (an assailant) threatened her life and the life of her unborn child.”
Nice, initially an alternate, served on the jury that convicted Peterson in the Christmas Eve 2003 deaths of his wife, Laci, and the couple’s unborn son, Conner. Peterson was sentenced to death. Earlier this year, the state Supreme Court overturned his death sentence on the grounds that some jurors were wrongfully excluded from serving, and in a separate decision sent the juror misconduct claim regarding the guilt phase of the trial back to the lower court.
Prosecutors have said they plan to retry the death penalty portion of the trial, but the misconduct claim is being addressed first because it could lead to a complete retrial.
A pretrial questionnaire for prospective jurors asked whether they ever had been in a lawsuit or trial and whether they, family or friends had been crime victims. Nice checked “no” – all false answers, according to the habeas petition.
Four years before the trial, Nice was four and a half months pregnant when her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend stalked and threatened them. The woman spent a week in jail and Nice obtained a restraining order against her.
And in an separate incident, in 2001 Nice’s ex-boyfriend was arrested on charges that included domestic violence in an incident that named her as a victim. He pleaded no contest in 2002. In a statement submitted with the response, Nice said she did not contact police and did not consider herself a victim.
According to the petition, Nice was almost excused from jury service because her employer would stop paying her two weeks into a trial that would last several months. But Nice asked to stay on anyway.
Fladager and Harris, in their response, said it was defense attorney Mark Geragos who pressured Judge Alfred Delucci to keep Nice on the jury, pointing out that some other jurors also had claimed they would suffer financial hardship by serving..
“(Nice) had gotten up to leave and was walking out,” they wrote. “Her actions clearly belie any suggestion by Petitioner that she was angling to get on the jury. Once it became clear to her that she would be excused based on a hardship, Juror No. 7 did not protest or otherwise attempt to avoid being excused: she got up and intended to leave, until Petitioner’s trial counsel intervened.”
In a 2017 interview with The Bee, Nice said that she did not lie to get on Peterson’s trial and that her situation while pregnant was in no way similar to Laci’s.
Nice’s assailant served a week in jail for vandalism, not murdering two people, according to a response to Peterson’s petition by the California Attorney General’s Office.
The response said Nice didn’t know that a restraining order is a type of lawsuit, “In common parlance, a lawsuit could reasonably be understood as an action in which one person sues another for money, property etc.,” it reads.
The response filed by Fladager and Harris made a similar point.
“Even if (Nice) may be reasonably characterized as unsophisticated or somewhat naïve when it comes to legal matters, Petitioner has failed to demonstrate that she committed prejudicial misconduct in the manner in which she answered certain questions in the juror questionnaire,” they wrote. “Even assuming (Nice) should have disclosed the contested information, she did not intentionally withhold the information and acted in good faith.
This story was originally published December 14, 2020 at 4:00 AM with the headline "Peterson juror was ‘average person’ and not woman with agenda, prosecutors say."
