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I’m usually not that interested in King County Superior Court judge races, but this one caught my attention because I served as a juror in North’s courtroom for a month and a half last year. (Thread)
As a juror, you’re obviously not privy to much of the important stuff in a trial, like what evidence they allow, so I don’t have a lot from my experience to base an opinion on. Except...
During deliberations, we TWICE found errors in the jury instructions. Twice we had to ask for corrections to the instructions. It was a felony trial; the defendant was facing a lot of time. I was not super impressed. ...
After the trial was over, and the attorneys and judge came in to talk with us about the proceedings, I asked Judge North if it was unusual for a jury to be given instructions with multiple errors that the jury had to ask to be corrected. ...
And he said yes it was unusual, but that the defendant was being charged with a lot of counts, and he also spread the blame to the attorneys, saying that they had had a chance to review the instructions, and they had not noted any errors. ...
I was not impressed that he deflected blame for the errors, which we the jury wasted a lot of time puzzling over. We spent a long time assuming they must make sense and that we were missing something. We took the whole thing so seriously, we spent over a week deliberating. ...
Anyway, after the trial, I mentioned to a lawyer friend that I had served in North’s courtroom and she said he was “problematic.” I was intrigued, looked him up, and found this. https://www.kcba.org/For-Lawyers/Bar-Bulletin/PostId/327/judicial-conduct-commission-admonishes-judge-north
“During the hearing, Judge North said, “But we don’t have any information, of course, about Mr. Charisma, so we don’t know whether he’s some white guy like me making a threat or somebody who’s actually, you know, more likely to be a gangster.””
So, from my perspective, Doug North is a racist, careless, blame-shifting judge. Please vote for Carolyn Ladd.
And here’s a lovely endorsement of Ladd: https://twitter.com/casuallaw/status/1275835119488516097
Retweeting top-of-thread photo but with alt text
Addendum: No one has asked for verification about the jury instruction errors, but in case anyone is curious, I will provide the references from the jury minutes here.
First error:
First response:
Second error:
Second response:
In my recollection, the instruction he replaced had very significant changes from the original instruction.
These, of course, were only things we knew we had to ask about. If he had misstated any of the statutory language, we would not have known. If we had suspected something was amiss there, I’m not sure we’d have had the temerity to ask.
And I understand that the trial was complicated, with 12 separate criminal counts. And that jury instructions are a product of negotiation based on input from the attorneys, not an original narrative from the judge. But the judge is ultimately responsible.
I was disappointed that he immediately cast blame on the attys, because he made it seem like they had equal responsibility for the instructions. In the parlance of my last employer, he’d be called the “single-threaded owner,” the person with whom the buck is supposed to stop.
