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| Image Credit: CC BY 2.0 jmawork / Flickr |
In 1994, English insurance broker Stephen Young was found guilty of the gruesome double murder of Harry and Nicola Fuller. When the sentence came down, Sussex Police detective Graham Hill believed justice had been served.
The couple had been found dead on the floor of their home a year earlier, with Nicola shot three times and Harry shot in the back at close range.
The lead investigator on the case, Mr Hill said the verdict, which followed a five-week jury trial, marked the end of a difficult period.
"There was relief the case was finished," he said. "Obviously all people that are involved in the prosecution were pleased the verdict was one of guilty, because there's...as you can imagine, a huge amount of work goes into that."
One month after the trial had concluded, a front page headline of the now-defunct News of the World newspaper appeared out of nowhere, and hit like a shot:
'Murder Jury's Ouija Board Verdict': 'Booze, Dirty Jokes and then the Ouija Board'.
The report quoted the youngest member of the jury, 24-year-old Adrian, who said four jurors had tried to consult the spirits of the dead while locked overnight in Brighton's Old Ship Hotel.
As the other jurors slept, the small group sat on the floor around a crude Ouija board they had made from a piece of paper and a hotel room wine glass.
They each put a finger on top of the glass and asked a spirit to guide the glass over letters of the alphabet and the words 'yes' or 'no'.
One juror, Ray, took charge of addressing the spirit, which identified itself via the glass as Harry Fuller.
Ray asked, "Who killed you?". The glass spelled out, "Stephen Young done it".
He said, "How?". The glass spelled, "Shot".
As the jurors discussed what they should do, the glass spelled out: "Vote guilty tomorrow".
By the end of the seance, some of the jurors were crying. A few jurors would later say they felt they had gone too far.
The group retired to their rooms and agreed not to tell the others what they had done. Just a few weeks later, their actions were causing controversy around the world.
Graham Hill still remembers his disbelief when his neighbour passed him the newspaper front page over the garden fence.
"Probably your initial thought would be, well it'll prove that it's a lot of old nonsense," he said.
The headline was just the beginning of a case which would become one of the most high-profile examples of juror misbehaviour in the world.
Juror misbehaviour
Although they don't always try to make contact with ghosts, juror misbehaviour is not uncommon.
Trials may be long and dull, or packed with complicated evidence that frustrates jurors' attempts to stay focussed.
Some years ago, an Australian trial was called off when the judge discovered several jurors had been spending half their time in court playing Sudoko while listening to detailed technical information on the manufacture of amphetamines.
Then there is the rise of online search engines and social media, both of which allow jurors to find potentially prejudicial information with ease.
A recent study in the UK found that 12 per cent of jurors in high-profile cases had actively searched online for information, and an Australian trial has already been jeopardised by a juror bringing in pages of Google research printed at home.
Often, misbehaviour can be traced back to the disturbing nature of many trials, especially those involving murder or abuse.
While researching the Ouija board trial for his book The Ouija Board Jurors: Mystery, Mischief and Misery in the Jury Room, University of Melbourne criminal law professor Jeremy Gans discovered the seance jurors were not the first group to hear the prosecutor's evidence.
An earlier jury had been played a tape of the emergency call Nicola Fuller made between being shot for the first time and her death.
"They lasted a whole day before one of the jurors wrote a letter to the judge saying that she couldn't go on," he said.
The evidence was too upsetting.
"And the judge at that point said, 'Okay, we'll just start again with a new jury,' because he didn't want to have to work out how to deal with this one upset juror."
Professor Gans said this belies the depiction of the Ouija board jury as simply playing games with an important case.
"It brings home that this would have been a very disturbing trial for them," he said.
"This couldn't have been a fun trial for the jury, and it made me think that whatever was going on in that hotel room probably wasn't good times for the jury but perhaps something else: coping with what they were hearing."
The cost of appeal
When juror misbehaviour prompts a retrial, it can have a high cost.
The sudoku jury, for example, was dismissed on the 66th day of the trial, after hundreds of thousands of dollars had already been spent on legal costs.
And with particularly traumatic cases, the re-trial entails putting everyone — the judge and their staff, the accused, the complainant, witnesses and jurors — back through the process again.
Following the revelations in the News of the World, the UK Court of Appeal quashed the double murder conviction of Stephen Young and ordered a new trial.
After a five-week hearing in December 1994, the jury found Stephen Young guilty again.
Responding to the Court of Appeals decision, Nicola Fuller's father said the Ouija jurors "made a complete joke of our daughter's death."
Decades after his involvement with the investigation, Graham Hill said he agreed with this assessment.
"I think it was ... I'm using the word 'stupid' but it's far worse than that," he said.
"This is making an absolute mockery, and it's the most serious type of trial you can ever have.
"There is no element of humour in it at all, there's no frivolity in it at all, and yet those four members of the jury made it into a laughing stock."
Professor Gans said juror misbehaviour will inevitably occur, and this case was unexceptional except for the tabloid media coverage.
He believes this media attention may have influenced the decision of the Court of Appeals to order a retrial.
"They [juries] do this all the time," he said.
"There are plenty of other cases that year where jurors were reported to have done somewhat odd things: falling asleep, giggling, grimacing, falling in love with a barrister.
"And the court just in each case said, 'That's the jury system for you. It's a little bit crazy.'"
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