Appeals Court: Cellphone-Peeking Jurors Scuttle Peeping Tom Verdict
The Court of Appeals ruling said the postconviction revelation that jurors had looked up information on the location of the defendant's house and that of his alleged victim created a "presumption of prejudice" the state could not overcome.
May 23, 2018 at 01:44 PM
4 minute read
The Georgia Court of Appeals has ordered a new trial for a man convicted on a peeping Tom charge after jurors used their cellphones to look up information about his house and that of his alleged victim.
Floyd County prosecutors learned of the jurors' online research after the trial and alerted defense counsel, whose request for a new trial had been denied.
The appeals court said that, while the evidence was sufficient to support Timothy Edge's conviction, the state failed to overcome the “presumption of prejudice” to his case by the jurors' snooping.
It noted in particular that, while some of the jurors were questioned at a hearing on the new trial motion, the one juror who managed to actually pull up information on his phone was not present, “and it is unknown whether the information affected his decision to convict.”
“Nor is it known whether this information affected the decision of those other jurors with whom this information was shared,” said the May 18 ruling penned by Judge Charlie Bethel with the concurrence of Judge John Ellington and Senior Judge Herbert Phipps.
According to a report in the Rome News-Tribune, it was only in September 2016 that the public was allowed to bring cellphones into the county courthouse. Edge's trial was held two days after that rule changed.
Floyd County District Attorney Leigh Patterson and Assistant DA Luke Martin, who handled the case, said Superior Court Judge J. Bryant Durham had warned jurors not to use cellphones or social media.
“Obviously it's a problem, because this case has been reversed,” said Patterson. “We have also had issues with witnesses or spectators in cases trying to take pictures—they posted somebody on Facebook Live. We had another case where another judge had to get on somebody during deliberations for looking something up online.”
Edge's court-appointed appellate attorney, Deborah Leslie of Jonesboro's Leslie Group, said she had subpoenaed all the jurors for the new trial motion hearing.
According to the opinion, Edge apparently had a falling out with a neighbor, now-deceased Rose Storey, who lived next door with her son. The spat was over damage to a trailer caused by tree limbs that fell onto Edge's property.
Over the following years, “Edge became increasingly hostile toward the Storeys,” yelling and making threatening motions at them when they went outside, shooting a Taser at Story's dogs and aiming a camera at her front porch, according to the opinion.
A neighbor reported seeing Edge standing on Storey's picnic table looking into her house, and another reported seeing him on her front porch looking into her house at 4:30 a.m. Edge denied the allegations.
According to an online docket, Edge, 58, was arrested in 2015 and charged with three counts of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon—all of which were dismissed—and one count of peeping Tom.
He was convicted and sentenced to two years probation following a Sept. 21 trial, Patterson said.
Following the trial, one of the jurors told his wife, who works in the court clerk's office, that some jurors had been trying to look up the locations of the Edge's and Storey's houses.
She told Martin, who told Edge's new appellate counsel, Leslie.
During the new trial hearing, “three jurors testified that two or three other unnamed jurors used their cellphones to attempt to view maps showing the distance between and relative orientation of homes” in the area.
One juror testified he was unable to pull up the information, but another accessed “a picture of some sort that showed a property line,” the opinion said. “This information was shared with several other jurors” and spurred some discussion about the distance between the properties.
The jurors who returned to testify said the information did not impact their ultimate decisions, according to the opinion.
Durham denied the motion for new trial, and Edge appealed on several issues.
The appellate opinion agreed with Durham on all but the cellphone issue, which “a reasonable possibility exists that juror misconduct could have contributed” to Edge's conviction.
“To be clear, we are not suggesting that in every case where juror misconduct is alleged, the state is under an obligation to call each individual juror,” Bethel wrote. “Rather, because the state did not call the juror known to have engaged in the misconduct in question, the state did not provide sufficient proof to overcome the presumption of harm beyond a reasonable doubt.”
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