News: MD Smokers not wanted on jury

By Jonathan On Jul 5, 2017

Want to get out of jury duty?
Take up smoking.

Get those smokers out of the courtroom

4/22/07
Laura Vozzella

Want to get out of jury duty? Take up smoking.
U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz has suggested keeping smokers off the jury in the Tommy Bromwell RICO case.

His concern: Jurors stepping outside the courthouse for smoke breaks might overhear conversations among all the spectators and journalists swarming around the high-profile trial.

“It’s just a potential risk. It’s just something to think about,” Motz told me.

Motz said he got the idea from another judge he met at a conference. He wouldn’t consider barring smokers from “a case against Philip Morris.” But in a big trial that has no obvious connection to smoking, he thinks that could help keep the jury untainted.

Couldn’t that skew the jury pool? Smokers tend to be poorer, less educated and, according to some studies, more likely to drink than nonsmokers. Maybe a jury of nonsmokers would be less sympathetic to a defendant with blue-collar roots – not to mention lots of alcohol-laced conversations on FBI tapes.

“It’s a legitimate question,” Motz said, speaking generally about a potential demographic skew – not the particulars of the Bromwell case.

In a letter to prosecutors and defense attorneys in the case, Motz has asked what they think of a nonsmoker jury. So far, they haven’t weighed in.

No place left to sneak a smoke

After being kicked out of offices, restaurants and bars – finally smokers could get booted from someplace nobody wants to be. Think they’d gladly be freed from an unpopular civic duty?

“The idea that the privilege should be taken away is terrible,” said Michael J. McFadden, mid-Atlantic director of The Smoker’s Club, a smokers’ rights group.

Motz said he could understand concern from a smokers’ rights angle. But he noted that he is not suggesting that smokers be barred from all juries, just those in very high-profile trials.

Federal jury selection law prohibits discrimination based on things like race, ethnicity, sex and economic status, said Professor Richard Bourne of the University of Baltimore law school. He doesn’t think smokers qualify as a protected class.

Even so, Bourne said he found Motz’s suggestion surprising and intriguing – mostly for what it says about society’s attitudes toward smokers.

“Frankly, I think it’s delicious,” said Bourne, who kicked his three-pack-a-day habit cold turkey on May 3, 1990, at 3:30 p.m., the moment “a doctor scared the hell out of me.”

(Full statement of Michael J. McFadden to the Baltimore Sun)
“I think it is highly improper for a judge to exclude a class of people from the jury pool in a case purely because they happen to smoke.?? If the judge is concerned about jurors going outside the courthouse to smoke then he or she should provide a room indoors for those jurors.? There has never been a finding by ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-conditioning Engineers), the EPA, or even the Surgeon General that indicates any health risk to nonsmokers from smokers in a separately ventilated room.? Legislators have passed laws in some jurisdictions forbidding such arrangements, but absent a clear and compelling danger to others’ health and well being those laws should not be allowed to impact upon one’s constitutional right to serve on a jury.”