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As he prepared to defend a 19-year-old client facing retrial on charges of gang rape, Orange County attorney Joseph Cavallo took a step that some legal experts are calling unusual at best - and at worst, potentially harmful to the entire trial-by-jury system. Mr. Cavallo announced he had hired as consultants members of a jury that had heard the same case last year but had not been able to reach a verdict. … Juror behavior has been making headlines of late. From the juror who was alleged to have gestured to the defense during last year's Tyco trial, to the juror who was said to have lied about his past in the Martha Stewart case, to the jurors who were dismissed during the Scott Peterson trial for various forms of misconduct, they've played high-profile roles in prominent cases. But Cavallo's move, which paves the way for jurors to gain financially through service as a consultant on a criminal retrial, is said to be without precedent. Jury consultants, including Tom Bernthal of Jury Insight in Los Angeles, say they've hired former jurors from civil trials to probe into how they reached their verdicts. But legal experts have never heard of jurors in a criminal trial being used in such a fashion. "I've never heard of that, not once," says Prof. Nancy Marder, who specializes in jury research at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. "It violates the core idea of jurors, that they are dispassionate, un-invested participants. That's unseemly and compromises the integrity of the court system."
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