Manhattan prosecutors failed to ask prospective jurors in the recent subway-push murder trial a basic question about whether they’d ever been arrested or convicted of a crime, transcripts released yesterday reveal.
Because of that oversight, Octavio Ramos, the holdout juror who caused a mistrial, slipped through the cracks and was selected to hear the case despite a recent misdemeanor conviction for harassing his landlord and punching a cop.
“That question takes exactly 30 seconds,” said Supreme Court Justice Joan Carey, the administrative judge for the court’s criminal term.
“This is jury selection 101.”
Once on the jury, Ramos’ refusal to deliberate led to a mistrial in the high-profile Manhattan Supreme Court case, in which Queens schizophrenic Andrew Goldstein, 30, faced life in prison for pushing beautiful aspiring screenwriter Kendra Webdale in front of a speeding Broadway subway train in January.
Other jurors in the case describe Ramos as irrational and unwilling to listen to them during six days of deliberations.
A retrial will cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars and subject the Webdale family to listening again to heartbreaking testimony about Kendra’s death.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to comment on why assistant district attorney William Greenbaum failed to inquire about Ramos’ criminal record.
That question, if answered truthfully, would almost certainly have led the judge to excuse him as potentially biased against law enforcement.
Ramos, a litigious Washington Heights tenant activist, had been found guilty in the same lower Manhattan courthouse, just two weeks prior to his selection for the jury. He is to be sentenced Nov. 19 to up to a year in jail.
The uniform qualifying questionnaire filled out by all prospective jurors asks general questions about citizenship, age and knowledge of English.
It asks prospective jurors if they have been convicted of a felony.
Misdemeanor convictions, like Ramos’, do not automatically bar people from serving on juries.
Court records released yesterday show that Ramos was part of a 30-person panel of prospective jurors. The 30 were questioned as a group and individually by Greenbaum, defense lawyers Harvey Fishbein and Jack Hoffinger, and Supreme Court Justice Carol Berkman – who allowed each side only 30 minutes to quiz all 30 prospects.
Sources close to the trial yesterday said some blame should be laid on Berkman – for limiting that time, and for refusing to let Greenbaum give each juror a 16-page questionnaire that would have asked specifically about arrest records.
Carey deflected that criticism. “The onus still is on the DA’s office to ask about arrest and criminal records, to find out if there is a bias against prosecutors. No one else [in the courtroom] is more in a position of needing to know that.”
Ironically, Ramos was chosen at Greenbaum’s insistence, after he complained that the defense had challenged four other prospective jurors with Latino names.