Credit: Shutterstock

A juror's potential exposure to COVID-19 has halted Michael Avenatti's wire fraud trial in Santa Ana, California, for the day.

U.S. District Judge James Selna of the Central District of California ordered Avenatti, who's representing himself, and prosecutors to reconvene at 8:30 a.m. Thursday.

The people who might have exposed the juror are being tested for COVID-19 on Wednesday, the judge said.

"I'd rather be safe than sorry," he said.

"If the situation isn't clarified by the first thing tomorrow, I'll dismiss the juror and we'll proceed," Selna said.

The jury still includes three alternates. It started with four alternates, but a juror was dismissed July 29 because his roommate was sick with possible COVID-19. Their tests later came back negative.

The judge on July 28 began requiring everyone in the courtroom to wear a mask, regardless of vaccination status. The Central District of California mandated masks in all buildings later that day.

Meanwhile, a trial in a courtroom down the hall from Selna's courtroom was disrupted for two days after a juror became infected with COVID. The trial reconvened today after the infected juror was dismissed.

Selna's colleagues in the Central District's Southern Division, which is based in Santa Ana, have publicly disagreed about the safety of jury trials during the pandemic. The Central District didn't hold jury trials for 14 months, which U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney said violated criminal defendants' constitutional rights.

Carney dismissed five criminal cases because of the trial ban and several times sharply criticized other judges for supporting the ban. "I don't feel reasonable people can disagree about the unconstitutionality of the indefinite suspension," Carney said during one dismissal hearing in February.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in April overturned Carney's first dismissal, a drug distribution case against Newport Beach doctor Greg Olsen, and called the reasoning behind his order "troubling."

"The pandemic is an extraordinary circumstance and reasonable minds may differ in how best to respond to it," according to the opinion. "The District Court here, however, simply misread the Speedy Trial Act's ends of justice provision in dismissing Olsen's indictment with prejudice."

Olsen's attorneys have petitioned the 9th for a rehearing or for the full court to review the decision en banc. The San Diego  Federal Defenders of San Diego, Inc., filed an amicus brief in June supporting the request.

"This resulting opinion will affect not just the thousands of cases pending during the pandemic, but also any future case where the ends-of-justice exclusion arises," according to the brief. "Instead of providing proper guidance, however, the opinion violates precedent, subverts the (Speedy Trial Act's) design, and sends mixed signals about how courts should treat pandemic-era delays."

When dismissing the cases, Carney repeatedly reverenced ongoing jury trials in nearby Orange County Superior Court, which led to U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton in her own courtroom questioning the safety of those trials. Staton's main point was that Orange County Superior Court couldn't definitively say jurors hadn't been infected in court because of covid's incubation period, its asymptotic spread and the court's lack of follow up with jurors after they've served to see if they've been infected.