When the jury in an Oakland double-murder case deadlocked on a death sentence, the foreman urged two jurors who favored a life term to rent the movie "American Me" so they could understand the violence inmates can cause behind bars.

Both jurors watched the video that night and quickly joined their colleagues the next morning in voting to sentence defendant Maurice Boyette to death - a sentence now upheld by a divided California Supreme Court.

Although the two jurors disobeyed the trial judge's order to consider only evidence introduced in court, there was no indication that they discussed the movie with other jurors - some of whom had already seen it - or that it influenced their deliberations, the court said in a 5-2 ruling issued last week.

"The record shows the movie did not introduce any new facts or ideas into the jury room," Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar said in the majority opinion. She said testimony by both jurors at a posttrial hearing indicated the film's message was "of little importance" to them.

Dissenting justices

That's not surprising, said dissenting Justice Carol Corrigan, because the hearing took place in 2010 - 17 years after the trial - and jurors were not allowed to testify about what they thought during deliberations.

The film's content and the timing of the death verdict, announced 30 minutes after jurors reconvened that morning, add up to "a substantial likelihood that these two jurors were actually biased," said Corrigan, who was joined in dissent by Justice Goodwin Liu. They said Boyette should get a new penalty trial.

Boyette, now 40, was convicted of fatally shooting Annette Davallier and Gary Carter in May 1992 on the orders of drug dealer Antoine Johnson, who believed they had robbed him.

The state Supreme Court upheld Boyette's death sentence in 2002, but the case returned to the justices on a claim of jury misconduct during the 1993 trial.

A court-appointed referee found that the foreman, in pretrial questioning, failed to disclose his criminal convictions and those of several relatives. But the justices upheld the referee's conclusion that the foreman made honest mistakes and there was no evidence he was biased.

It was also the foreman who told the two holdout jurors, after a day of inconclusive penalty-phase deliberations, to watch "American Me," a fictionalized account of prison gangs starring Edward James Olmos.

In posttrial testimony, the foreman said the film was based on a true story and that the two jurors, after seeing it, had "finally understood that Mr. Boyette could kill again in prison if he was not sentenced to death."

'General information'

But Werdegar, in the majority opinion, said there was no evidence that the unauthorized viewing tainted the deliberations. At most, she said, the two jurors "may have learned some general information about prison life" that other moviegoers on the jury had already known.

Defense lawyer Lynne Coffin called the case "outrageous" and said Boyette would appeal in federal court.

-- Online: The ruling in Boyette on Habeas Corpus, S092356, is at http://bit.ly/18zkeGP.
