A Multnomah County Circuit Court judge on Tuesday rejected a defendant’s request for a new trial, finding that juror conduct during deliberations didn’t deprive the man of his right to a fair trial.
Lawyers for Colby Benson, 40, had argued that he should get a new murder trial after a juror disclosed that another juror had searched the internet for instructions on how to zoom in on video evidence.
The disclosure prompted Judge David Rees to summon three jurors who served on Benson’s trial back into court to undergo questioning about what took place during deliberations.
The unusual proceeding shed light on the typically secretive process of jury deliberations.
Last month, the 12-person jury found Benson guilty for shooting and killing Christopher Klein, 30, as he sat in his car on Sept. 11, 2020, near Burnside Street and 122nd Avenue.
Prosecutors during the trial had submitted surveillance footage from multiple sources as evidence of Benson’s guilt. Benson’s lawyers raised the possibility that another assailant was responsible.
A juror had complained that prosecutors hadn’t done their job, leading the jurors to zoom in on the footage on their own. One of the jurors acknowledged that he had Googled how to zoom in on videos during deliberations.
During the Dec. 19 hearing before Rees, two jurors told the judge that they had used the video-playing software already on the laptop provided to them by the court to view the evidence and that one juror Googled how to view the footage frame by frame.
Rees said the juror’s Googling amounted to misconduct — jurors are repeatedly ordered not to do their own research during trials — but he said it did not “introduce any new substantive information or images that were not already part of the trial record.”
He concluded that the jury’s use of the video player’s magnifying feature was “not the result of any misconduct by the jury.”
“It was entirely reasonable for the jury to conclude that it could use the available software provided to them to zoom in on relevant portions of the video evidence just as the parties had done during the course of their trial presentations,” he ruled.
Benson’s lawyers, Rian Peck and Jordan Willetts, said they will appeal Rees’s ruling.
— Noelle Crombie is an enterprise reporter with a focus on criminal justice. Reach her at 503-276-7184; ncrombie@oregonian.com
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