Juror substitution case highlights top NC court’s divide

Of all the issues dividing Republicans and Democrats on North Carolina’s highest court, it’s unlikely many observers would have predicted a split over arithmetic.

Yet one could summarize a recent state Supreme Court case as seeking the solution for 12-1+1.

In State v. Chambers, the court’s five Republican justices answered 12. The two Democrats answered 13.

No, it’s not time to send Democratic justices back to school for remedial math. Their answers reflect a difference of opinion about the impact of North Carolina’s juror substitution law.

Eric Ramond Chambers was sentenced to life in prison without parole after a 2022 first-degree murder conviction in Wake County. Authorities had charged him in a shooting at a Raleigh motel that killed one victim and injured another.

On appeal, Chambers challenged the conviction on the basis of his jury’s composition. One juror had been excused from the case after participating in less than a half hour of deliberations. The following day, a substitute helped a 12-member jury reach a guilty verdict after three hours of discussions.

The case directly challenged a 2021 amendment of North Carolina’s juror substitution law. The original law enacted in 1977 allowed for a substitution before a case reached the jury. The amendment permitted juror substitution at any time before the case’s verdict.

Chambers’ lawyers labeled that change unconstitutional. A three-judge North Carolina Court of Appeals panel agreed unanimously.

State lawyers asked the high court to overturn that decision.

“In this case we resolve whether a statute that allows a juror to be excused and substituted by an alternate after the jury in a criminal trial has begun to deliberate violates our state constitution,” Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote for the court’s Republican majority. “Article I, Section 24 requires a conviction to be by a unanimous jury in open court. This Court has consistently held that a constitutionally prescribed jury in a criminal case must be composed of twelve people.”

“The statute in question requires a jury to begin its deliberations anew following the substitution of  an alternate juror,” Newby added. “We therefore conclude that the statute does not violate defendant’s state constitutional right to a jury of twelve, and we reverse the decision of the Court of Appeals.”

Trial Judge Rebecca Holt had followed the law’s guidance, Newby noted. She instructed jurors to  “’restart … deliberations from the beginning. This means that you should disregard entirely any deliberations taken place before the alternate juror was substituted and should consider freshly the evidence as if the previous deliberations had never occurred.’”

The 2021 law “provides two critical safeguards that ensure that the twelve-juror threshold remains sacrosanct,” Newby added. Not only does it “provide that ‘[i]n no event shall more than [twelve] jurors participate in the jury’s deliberations’; it also requires trial courts to instruct juries to ‘begin … deliberations anew’ if an alternative juror is substituted after jury deliberations have begun.”

“This requirement preserves the statute’s constitutionality,” Newby wrote. “When a jury follows the trial court’s instruction and restarts deliberations, as it is presumed to do, there is no longer a risk that the verdict will be rendered by thirteen people.”

Republican justices supported Newby’s reasoning. For the high court’s Democrats, in contrast, 12-1+1 does not produce a constitutionally valid 12-member jury.

“Instructions that mandate that jurors ‘begin … deliberations anew’ cannot remedy the structural error resulting from more than twelve participants in the jury verdict,” wrote Justice Allison Riggs in dissent. “Thus, I would conclude that allowing for the substitution of an alternate juror during deliberations violates Article I, Section 24 of the North Carolina Constitution and is unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Riggs dismissed the fact that the excused juror took part in limited deliberations.

“A curative instruction cannot erase the thirty minutes of deliberation that occurred with the first jury of twelve,” she wrote. “It is entirely possible that deliberation by the second jury of twelve was informed and influenced by the excused juror’s views and discussion during the first deliberation.”

“In accordance with the right enshrined in our 1776 State Constitution and centuries of case law from this Court, I would hold that allowing for the substitution of a juror after the start of deliberations under N.C.G.S. § 15A-1215(a) is unconstitutional,” Riggs concluded.

Chambers will continue to serve his life sentence. His case also has implications for future defendants.

Thanks to conservatives’ 5-2 majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court, convicted criminals in this state cannot use a juror substitution as an excuse to have a guilty verdict overturned.

Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.