- The holiday season can mean rushed jury verdicts, lawyers say.
- Savvy lawyers can also use breaks to their advantage.
The end-of-year holiday season can mean rushing to finish your work so you can relax with your family.
People on jury duty often feel the same way.
Looming holidays can mean that juries might be more inclined to reach a verdict with haste and go home to their families, experts say. It's a factor lawyers have to take in as jurors deliberate this time of year.
We saw it recently with the Harvey Weinstein trial in Los Angeles, which reached a verdict shortly before Christmas. A few weeks ago, the Trump Organization trial in New York took a break over Thanksgiving weekend, then went to deliberations the following week. Last year, jurors who ultimately voted to convict Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell of sex trafficking broke for Christmas before reaching a verdict just ahead of the New Year's holiday.
These breaks are a headache for everyone involved. And it's jarring to be spending days on a case about, say, sexual abuse or murder, to take a break for a warm and jolly holiday with your family, and to return to the grimness afterward. It's common, many lawyers say, for juries to want to wrap things up before a holiday.
"If you're waiting for a verdict, and there's a break coming up — either for a weekend or a holiday — you want to make sure you're near the courtroom," Sarah Krissoff, a former federal prosecutor, told Insider.
Many lawyers, however, use the breaks as part of their strategies.
"Jurors rush through verdicts when the weekend is approaching, and even more so before an upcoming holiday," Neama Rahmani, the president of West Coast Trial lawyers, told Insider. "Savvy lawyers use this to their advantage."
Holidays put the pressure on
Most people don't like jury duty. And while judges will repeatedly inform jurors that their role is a solemn and vital part to keep our legal system just, they often want to just get things over with.
Julia Vitullo-Martin, a former director of the Citizens Jury Project, which advocated for reform in the New York jury system, said it could compromise the way the system is supposed to work.
"It's been a problem over the years that sometimes there's a holdout, and everyone else is convinced that somebody's guilty, and there's a three-day weekend," Vitullo-Martin told Insider. "The holdout can often be pressured by his fellow jurors to come to a decision that he doesn't think is right."
There are other psychological factors. According to Jill Huntley-Taylor, a jury consultant, civil defendants don't like having cases around the winter holidays, as jurors are thought to be more in a generous mood.
At the same time, the 12-person system acts as a check on any particular juror's underbaked whims.
"Juries almost always take their jobs seriously and a rush to reach a verdict is likely more an individual juror tendency," Huntley-Taylor told Insider in an email. "The beauty of the jury is that there are multiple people assembled to reach a verdict, so any pressure or rush by a juror would ignore most jurors' desire to deliberate to a verdict they can all feel good about (or at least a thoughtful one)."
Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor, tries to use that dynamic to his advantage.
"When I was a prosecutor, I tried to finish my closing argument later in the week, to encourage jurors to return a guilty verdict before the weekend. Many jurors don't want to serve, much less return on a Monday as a holdout," Rahmani said. "Similarly, defense lawyers would try to begin deliberations well before a weekend or holiday to avoid any artificial deadline that puts pressure on jurors to come to a unanimous verdict."
A break in the middle of jury deliberations can cause anxiety for defense attorneys, who may worry the jurors will rush to judgment. But breaks that take place in the middle of trial testimony can be used to either side's advantage.
We saw this in the Trump Organization trial, which sat mostly through November. Defense attorneys painted Trump as a generous boss, rather than one who approved of tax fraud for his company, right ahead of the Thanksgiving break. (The company was convicted.)
Judges may also schedule breaks in the middle of long trials to deal with other issues. We saw that in play with the Ghislaine Maxwell trial in Manhattan, where the judge, Alison Nathan, took a break in the middle so that she could answer questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee while she was up for a promotion to an appeals court. Prosecutors put on their final victim, Annie Farmer, whose testimony marinated in the minds of jurors before they could hear from the defense. (Nathan was ultimately confirmed to the Second Circuit.) A pause in the middle of the trial between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp allowed jurors to sit with some testimony Heard had provided just before the break.
"Sometimes an attorney can benefit by using a holiday break as a cliffhanger in the trial," Matthew Barhoma, founder of Barhoma Law and Power Trial Lawyers, told Insider. "If a prosecutor can end just before the break with an argument or a piece of evidence that leaves the jury pondering the defendant's likely guilt during the holiday, the prosecutor will push for that outcome."
People just want to get out of there
Sitting on a jury may be a noble endeavor that helps ensure people accused of crimes are fairly judged by their peers. But it can also be very boring, and a lot of work.
You need to spend hours listening to testimony and looking at evidence instead of, say, watching a funny video on TikTok, looking at your friend's vacation photos on Instagram, eating a doughnut, or any other one of life's minor pleasures we encounter on any given day.
And, like many things that are boring and a lot of work, you just kind of want to get it over with.
"Even in a celebrity-driven case, jury duty is not that much fun," Vitullo-Martin said. "So most people want to do the deliberation, come to a conclusion, and go home."
In this way, an upcoming holiday break is a lot like any given Friday. Judges will often repeatedly instruct jurors to take all the time they need to come to unanimous conclusions, but it just doesn't always work that way.
"You'll see it all the time," Krissoff said. "Let's say the jury starts deliberating on a Thursday morning, there's a pretty good chance they're done by Friday."
A holiday, Vitullo-Martin said, is "just one more incentive" to wrap things up.
"People want to go home, they want to get back to their regular lives," Vitullo-Martin said. "These factors — like a Friday afternoon, an upcoming holiday, a three-day weekend, your son's football game, all these other things in life — they're additional factors that encourage jurors to finish up the work."
The Thanksgiving-to-Christmas marathon
It's hard to find people who want to serve on a jury around the holiday season. During the selection process, many prospective jurors say they have plans to travel — which judges may or may not accept as an excuse.
But, to be sure, judges often don't want to hold trials over the holidays either. They have families, too. And the lawyers involved in cases may have their own plans they don't want to disrupt.
"In my experience, judges tend to take their vacation days during holiday periods, so a lot of the time those dates aren't even available and the issue doesn't come up," Miguel Custodio, co-founder of Custodio and Dubey LLP, told Insider.
In some parts of New York, September and October can be difficult to schedule as well, depending on when Jewish holidays fall, according to Krissoff, who now works as a defense attorney for criminal and complex commercial litigation cases.
Judges may also have their own preferences. It's not unheard of, Krissoff said, for lawyers and judges in Manhattan to try to avoid August, when the weather is muggy and people don't want to spend hours on end in a courtroom.
The result, Krissoff said, is that you'll usually find these fall trials scheduled between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which hopefully offers enough time for each side to present their evidence and for deliberations.
"I've had several trials start the Monday after Thanksgiving," Krissoff said. "They're trying to sandwich the trial between Thanksgiving and Christmas."
It's often a priority for judges to finish trials ahead of breaks to reduce the chances of juror misconduct. Jurors are only supposed to consider the evidence presented at a trial, not news reports or the opinions of family members around the dinner table.
"The admonishment from the judge, I think, is very scary," Krissoff said.
But it would surprise no one if people talked to family members about pending cases anyway.
"To the extent a case is high profile, maintaining confidentiality and avoiding discussions or news about cases naturally becomes harder during breaks," Huntley-Taylor said.
Finalizing a trial ahead of a holiday break minimizes the risk of jury misconduct, according to Barhoma.
"The longer jurors are away from court the more opportunity they have to commit jury misconduct such as reading media reports about the case or discussing it with family at holiday gatherings," Barhoma told Insider. "Judges lean toward wanting to wrap up proceedings before the holidays start."