It’s bad enough that non-English speaking commercial truck drivers in the U.S. don’t know the rules of the road or how to read highway signs, but this case out of Los Angeles should put you on high alert about how not knowing English can put Americans’ very liberty at risk.
Or set sex perverts free.
The existential threat of English-free commercial truck drivers — mostly given their CDLs by Washington state and California — has resulted in a lot of dead Americans. The case of the UCLA gynecologist, accused of sexually abusing his patients for years, however, portends more nuanced problems ahead. We’re now all witness to what happens when non-English speakers get on juries and don’t know what the hell is going on because they don’t understand the language.
An appeals court this week threw out the conviction and eleven-year sentence of UCLA gynecologist Dr. James Heaps because the judge didn’t bother to tell the perp’s lawyers that one of the jurors couldn’t speak English. The appeals court ruled that this lack of knowledge deprived the doctor of a fair trial.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the case against the doctor, who was accused by 200 former patients of sexually abusing them, will be retried.
A three-justice panel of the California 2nd District Court of Appeal ordered that the once-renowned cancer expert, James Heaps, 69, be sent back for a retrial on the charges involving the two patients he was convicted of abusing.
In October 2022, after a complex two-month jury trial, Heaps was convicted of three counts of sexual battery by fraud and two counts of sexual penetration involving the two patients. Jurors acquitted him of abusing two other patients and deadlocked on charges involving four more patients. In April 2023, a judge sentenced him to 11 years in prison.
For four years, hundreds of victims worried about money and missed work time, sat for hours-long depositions, and exposed their souls to strangers to bring the case to trial. Now, because the judge committed an obvious act of reversible error, they’re stuck going through it all over again. That’s because in 2023, the judge blew off a jury foreman’s note explaining the concern that within one hour of replacing another juror they realized Juror Number 15 “was not able to understand calls to vote guilty or not guilty, and expressed to us that his limited English interfered with his understanding of the testimony.”
Gee, do you think that might be a problem?
L.A. Superior Court Judge Michael D. Carter ignored the “collective concern” that Juror No. 15 “did not speak English sufficiently to deliberate and had already made up his mind,” the appeals panel wrote [emphasis added]. Did the juror know what he’d made up his mind about? He couldn’t articulate it in English, so nobody knows.
Oh, and this might have been a tell if the judge had bothered to mention this to the lawyers. After the note was sent the judge sent in a “judicial assistant spoke to the jury in English and, at the request of Juror No. 15, in Spanish.” Oh. And then Judge Michael D. Carter completely ignored the jurors’ concerns.
The appeals court decision said,“At no time did the trial judge inquire of the jury or inform trial counsel of the note’s existence.” No transcription of the judicial assistant’s discussion (in Spanish) with Juror Number 15 was provided in the court record. Is that a cover-up? Asking for a friend.
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Jury decisions must be unanimous in L.A. County criminal cases, so some might suggest the verdict was no harm, no foul because the “right” decision was made, but that’s not how any of this is supposed to work.
Based on the jury decision, UCLA was ordered to pay $700 million to settle multiple other lawsuits arising from the abuse. That settlement order will likely be vacated and the money returned and re-negotiated.
Attorney John Manly represented 200-plus victims and called the situation “an indictment of California’s criminal justice system which allows criminals to threaten public safety and prey upon the most vulnerable.’’
He was PO’d.
These brave survivors suffered through a four-year ordeal of prosecution and trial resulting in an 11-year prison sentence for this monster. Now they are being told that they must start over. … Our criminal justice system needs reforms that put victims first.’
The judge has been sent back to the bench by voters for 23 years and his cases have been reversed and remanded before. A man convicted of second degree murder in his court was later adjudged to have been an accessory after the fact in one case.
What a mess. And it’s all because one guy called for jury duty, whose name was on the list because he possessed a California driving license, couldn’t speak English.
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