New trial for inmate after jury ruled against him

The best way to get a new trial if the jury rules against you is to argue that the trial court got the jury charge wrong. A good deal of the trial court's decisionmaking at trial is difficult to challenge on appeal, as the judge had discretion to admit or deny certain evidence. But the judge has no authority to instruct the jury improperly. We learn that lesson in this case.

The case is Sloley v. Vanbremer, a summary order issued on September 26. This case alleges that correction officers subjected plaintiff to a body cavity search in violation of the Constitution. The trial court initially dismissed the case on summary judgment, but the Second Circuit reinstated case on the basis that the jury could find the officers conducted the highly-intrusive cavity search without reasonable suspicion. The citation for that ruling is 945 F.3d 30 (2d Cir. 2019).

While other searches, such as one that does not involve cavity searches, do not carry the reasonable suspicion standard, this heightened standard applies to cavity searches because they are more intrusive. Under the reasonable suspicion standard, the officer needs "reason to believe, based on specific and articulable facts, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, that an arrestee is secreting contraband inside a body cavity." That language derives from the earlier appeal in this case.

Since plaintiff won the first appeal, the case went to trial. The jury ruled against plaintiff. But the case is not over! When the trial court charged the jury, it said that "the relevant question is do the circumstances of plaintiff's arrest support a reasonable suspicion that he was hiding contraband in or on his person?" The "in or on" language is the problem here. The "on" component of the jury charge allows the jury to rule against plaintiff if it found the officer had reasonable suspicion to believe that plaintiff had drugs on his person rather than in his body cavity. If the jury interpreted the charge that way, then it could have determined that the cavity search was OK even if the officer only thought that plaintiff had drugs on his person instead of inside a body cavity. 

Since the jury charge was incorrect, plaintiff gets a new trial, as the plaintiff may have lost the case under an incorrect legal principle. The defendants argued that, notwithstanding this charge, the charge overall was OK because the jury elsewhere in the charge gave the jury a correct statement of the law. But the Court of Appeals (Merriam, Parker and Newman) notes that the Second Circuit has long held that a bad charge is not cured by the correct standard elsewhere in the charge. And, while the verdict sheet correctly stated the legal principle guiding this case, that does not cure the error in the jury charge, either, since language in the charge and not the verdict sheet controls this inquiry. As the Second Circuit states, "the jury can only read the verdict form in the light of the explicit instructions the court has given."