Juror in Sean 'Diddy' Combs' trial dismissed over conflicting statements
Combs' lawyers opposed the removal of the juror, who was one of two Black men on the jury and identified himself in voir dire as a fan of 1990s hip-hop music.
A juror was dismissed from Sean “Diddy” Combs’ trial on Monday after the judge said his inconsistent statements about living in both the Bronx and New Jersey raise questions about his “basic qualifications to serve.”
Combs’ lawyers accused prosecutors of targeting the 41-year-old man because he is Black. They asked U.S. District Judge Arun Subramamian to declare a mistrial if he dismissed him from the jury, but the judge declined.
The man works at a minimum-security state prison in upper Manhattan and described himself in voir dire as a fan of 1990s hip-hop music. An architect who is a 57-year-old white man from Westchester replaced him.
Judge Subramamian said Combs’ lawyers initially agreed prosecutors weren’t intentionally discriminating against the man because of his race, but “now, it may be intentional.”
“The defense asks this Court to base its decision-making on race, but it would be improper to allow the race of juror No. 6 and the alternate juror to factor into the proper course here at all. The Supreme Court has prohibited precisely that kind of injection of race into the process,” Subramamian said.
Subramamian, a 2023 Joe Biden appointee, cited the oft-cited 1986 U.S. Supreme Court case Batson v. Kentucky, which addresses peremptory challenges in jury selection and said “a defendant has no right to a petit jury composed, in whole or in part, of persons of his own race, because the number of our races and nationalities stands in the way of evolution of such a conception of the demand of equal protection.”
“The court there confirmed a person’s race simply is unrelated to his fitness as a juror,” Subramamian said.
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The problem arose last week after the juror had what Judge Subramamian described on Friday as “an offhand conversation" with a court employee that indicated "he recently moved to New Jersey.”
When the judge questioned him, the juror said “he moved in with his girlfriend” and while the move may not be permanent, he’d been staying there “for the last couple weeks,” according to a court reporter’s transcript obtained by Legal Affairs and Trials.
The juror said he still stayed at his New York City apartment “four to five” nights a week, “mostly during the week,” Subramamian said. But he also said his daughter has always lived in the New Jersey apartment, but prosecutors noted he said during voir dire that he lived in the Bronx with his fiancée and daughter.
“And so there’s an inconsistency between the voir dire transcript and the robing room transcript on that particular issue,” Subramamian said on Friday.
The judge said the issue is whether the juror “was unable to follow simple instructions and answer simple questions, or if there was any effort ... to shade the truth or be deceptive about matters that were inquired upon both in the voir dire proceeding, which is a critical part of this case.”
It may seem “like a trivial matter in one sense,” Subramamian said, but “it goes to the question of the juror’s basic qualifications to serve under the criteria that’s spelled out in the governing statute.”
“Even if the juror is, as a technical matter, qualified, omissions or inconsistencies as to such a basic question as to where you live raise serious questions concerning the propriety of maintaining this juror,” Subramamian said. “Where there is a question like this on this record raised as to those points, removal of the juror is required in this Court’s view.”
Combs’ lawyer Xavier Donaldson said he was “concerned the Court is equating inconsistencies with the possibility of being untruthful or shading the truth.”
“I think this particular juror answered the questions as truthfully as he could,” Donaldson said. “I think we put questions to this juror in the back, and we are, as attorneys in the court, analyzing his answers in a way that produces inconsistencies, that may be true, but I don’t think they are indicative of him not being truthful or trying to hide something from the Court.”
Donaldson suggested questioning the juror again so “we can come to some understanding of what really happened” and said the juror has “dedicated time to be here.”
He said he doesn’t disagree “specifically” with Subramamian’s finding that prosecutors are not showing bias, but he said he felt ‘obligated to say” that the jury is the most diverse in the 25-30 years he’s practiced in the Southern District of New York.
Donaldson cited the 2024 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decision in United States v. Slaughter, which said the “underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic or Latino people” in district jury pools “is significant.”
“We have been going in the opposite direction since 1990s in this particular district when it comes to Black and Hispanic jurors,” said Donaldson, a Howard University School of Law graduate and licensed lawyer in New York since 1995. “For whatever reason, the process that this Court used for us to get a jury worked, and it worked wonderfully in that we got a diverse jury.”
“How this happened is one thing. But the result of what’s going to happen if we take this juror off on this record, the result is, in my opinion, going backwards,” he continued.
Donaldson reiterated that he doesn’t believe prosecutors were intentionally discriminating against the juror because he’s Black.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Mitzi Steiner, however, said Donaldson’s reason for keeping the juror is based on race.
“I think all the jurors have been paying close attention, including the alternates. So we have no reason to doubt the ability of an alternate or any of the other jurors to continue on in this case and to fulfill their obligations,” Steiner said.
Subramamian said the juror’s answers about residency in voir dire “suggest an effort to, in the juror’s mind, try to get onto the jury.”
Any explanation from the juror now “would not address why there were inconsistencies in the first place, and it would not address the concern of whether the juror is shading answers or trying to provide an explanation in an attempt to stay on the jury,” the judge said.
Donaldson said said he doesn’t “generally play the race card unless I have it in my hand. And I’m not saying I’m playing it now, but the facts are the facts, and I’ll go with what the facts are.”
Combs’ lawyer Brian Steel suggested prosecutors were targeting the jury because they fear he may be sympathetic to Combs. He questioned why prosecutors didn’t raise the issue until “after weeks of trial, after watching which, each juror makes faces at certain times or may have some sort of reflection in their body language.”
“And I think that that’s a very bad road to go down, because that’s how people game the system. I’m not poking at the prosecution or anybody else. I’m just saying that it seems like it’s an issue that everybody knew about, but nobody was concerned with it to raise it when we were striking the jury and exercising our peremptory challenges,” Steel said.
Subramamian, however, said he wasn’t sure what Steel meant because the issue regarding the juror’s residence “came to light this week.”
“This was certainly not known to the Court at voir dire. And if it was known to the defense, then I think that’s a separate issue. But it was certainly not known to the Court, and it’s certainly not something that was raised during the voir dire process,” the judge said.
Steiner told the judge prosecutors didn’t know of the residency issue during voir dire, and Combs’ lawyer Teny Geragos said “we didn’t, either.”
“I just want to make that very clear as well,” Geragos said.
Late Sunday, Combs’ lawyers filed a 14-page letter expressing their “vigorous opposition” that said while Subramamian “has refused” to say prosecutors have a discriminatory motive, “we respectfully, and regrettably, disagree.”
“The government’s motion must be evaluated in light of the entire history of this investigation and prosecution, and not in isolation,” according to the letter signed by Alexandra Shapiro of Shapiro Arato Bach LLP in New York City. “Unfortunately, when considered against that background it is impossible to believe that this motion is merely a good-faith attempt to raise a valid question about the juror’s integrity rather than an effort to take advantage of an opportunity to strike yet another black male from the jury.”
Prosecutors’ four-page response said, “Despite the Court’s clear ruling on the necessity of removing Juror [redacted] the defense again attempts to cast the Government’s motion to remove the juror as racially motivated. As the Court recognized on Friday after the defense first lobbed this baseless accusation, nothing could be further from the truth.”
They said they didn’t oppose questioning the juror again, but the “remainder of the defendant’s letter — pages’ worth of baseless ad hominem attacks on the prosecutors in this case — should be disregarded and rebuked.”
But Judge Subramamian said on Monday “there has been no evidence of prosecutorial misconduct brought to the Court’ attention.”
“Zero,” he said. “To the extent that these accusations are an effort to pressure the Court to make a decision on the juror issues before it based on race, the Court rejects that invitation.”
The judge said he’s often sided with the defense, “but inviting the Court to make a decision based on race would be doing what the Supreme Court for decades has flatly prohibited.”
Subramamian said he also agreed with the defense’s initial argument that further questioning the juror “would almost certainly have a negative impact on the juror that might impact the deliberations going forward in unpredictable ways, potentially compromising the jury's functioning.”
“As the Court observed on Friday, this is precisely why we have alternate jurors. We are not equipped in this setting to do a forensic investigation into the issues raised. So we have alternate jurors precisely for this kind of situation, to avoid even the appearance that the fair and impartial nature of the process has been undermined,” Subramamian said.
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