Tag: judge morris hoffman
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Colorado justices find Denver judge appropriately subbed in alternate juror mid-deliberations
The Colorado Supreme Court concluded on Monday that a Denver judge did what he needed to do to ensure a defendant received a fair trial after one juror became ill in the middle of deliberations and had to be replaced with the alternate. Ricardo Castro’s jury deliberated for 11 hours total until it recessed on…
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Is Colorado’s Supreme Court about to kill implicit bias reform?
Last year, the Colorado Supreme Court indicated it would first decide a handful of pending cases alleging racial bias in jury selection before it took action on a proposal that would make it more difficult for prosecutors to remove jurors of color for reasons that, while not explicitly racial, nonetheless correlate to race. On Monday,…
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Colorado Supreme Court ponders what to do when substituting alternate jurors mid-deliberation
When one juror in Ricardo Castro’s criminal trial became incapacitated 11 hours into the jury’s deliberations and could not continue, there was broad agreement afterward that the trial judge did everything he could to emphasize the need for remaining jurors to begin anew – with the alternate juror replacing her stricken counterpart. The question now…