Judge Biggers granted the motion for an anonymous jury in U.S. v. Scruggs. This means that the parties will not be allowed to know the names or employers of the jurors. They will know how they are employed, and he has already granted the defense request for a jury questionnaire which (though I haven’t seen) will provide a lot of data about the jurors.
The Order granting an anonymous jury is an interesting one.
I will have to say that this is the first motion decision that surprised me somewhat, partly in the timing of it. The other day I posted that I was unsure how this one would go but thought probably not, thinking that sequestration would handle much of the problems. I was wrong, partly in not focusing on impact of the charge of interference with the justice system on the analysis of this issue. The order invokes the problem of non-parties contacting the jurors on the defendants’ behalf, which resonates with the charge of what both Balducci and Peters did for Scruggs.
