State v. Lodzinski, 246 N.J. 331 (2021). As discussed here, this was a highly publicized case, in which a jury found defendant was guilty of the first-degree murder of her five-year old son. The Appellate Division affirmed the conviction in an unpublished opinion. The Supreme Court granted review, and today the Court split 3-3 (Chief Justice Rabner did not participate). In a concurring opinion by Justice Patterson, she and Justices Fernandez-Vina and Solomon voted to affirm the conviction. Dissenting, Justices Albin, the author of the dissent, LaVecchia, and Pierre-Louis. The effect of that evenly divided vote is to affirm the Appellate Division’s ruling upholding the conviction.
The issue that caused the split was whether the evidence was sufficient to convict defendant of murder. The concurring Justices applied the test of State v. Reyes, 50 N.J. 454 (1967), under which the State’s evidence is to be “view[ed] in its entirety … giving the State the benefit of all its favorable testimony as well as all of the favorable inferences which reasonably could be drawn therefrom,” in order to see whether a reasonable jury could have found guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The concurring Justices concluded that the evidence was sufficient.
The dissenters disagreed. Justice Albin wrote that there was no rational basis in the direct and inferential evidence to support the conviction. The dissenters believed that the verdict was based on speculation.
The two opinions discuss the evidence at great length. Readers can determine for themselves who has the better of the argument.
The six Justices did agree on two things, however. First, they “unanimously modif[ied] the Appellate Division’s holding with respect to its characterization of the scope of the evidence that should be considered in reviewing a post-verdict motion for a judgment of acquittal.” The proper scope of review, as stated in Justice Patterson’s concurrence, is to evaluate all the evidence, including evidence offered by the defendant. The Appellate Division had stated that the defendant’s evidence is irrelevant to the analysis on a defendant’s post-verdict motion for acquittal.
Second, applying the abuse of discretion standard of review, the Justices unanimously held that the dismissal of a juror and the seating of an alternate in that juror’s stead was not improper. The excused juror had conducted his own research, in violation of the trial judge’s instruction that jurors not do that. “Nothing in the record suggests that the opinion of a single juror was swayed by their fellow juror’s improper conduct.” It was early enough in the deliberations that the jury had “reached a partial verdict or even preliminary determinations on any issue; all of the remaining jurors assured the court that they could fairly decide the case.” The trial judge had thus properly instructed the reconstituted jury to begin deliberations anew.
Thus ends a celebrated case, not with a bang, but with the whimper of an equally divided Court.