By Hudson Sangree
hsangree@sacbee.com
A Yolo Superior Court judge today dismissed a juror from death penalty deliberations in a cop-killing trial because he found her language skills to be lacking.
The woman was one of 12 jurors who last month swiflty convicted defendant Marco Antonio Topete of the first-degree murder of Yolo Sheriff's Deputy Jose Antonio Diaz in June 2008.
On Thursday, the woman, identified only as juror number 11 sent a note to Judge Paul Richardson saying she had been raised in a foreign country and was unable to see the death penalty phase from an American perspective. She worried she was "dragging others juries down." She asked to be replaced with an alternate juror.
Defense lawyers adamantly argued against replacing her, saying she was having legitimate differences with the other jurors. Prosecutors said she had to be replaced because she was "impaired" by her lack of English.
The judge called her into the courtroom this morning and conducted a cautious inquiry into her situation. Juror deliberations must remain secret under the law. Richardson asked the woman whether her note meant language was a problem for her.
"Partially," she said. Some words were hard to translate, she said.
She told the judge she was raised in Russia and trained as a thermal engineer there, receiving a degree in 1978.
The judge asked if she felt free to deliberate with other jurors, and she responded, "Not that free."
The juror told the judge that she had a different "point of view from other people that are around me."
"My English is limited. I cannot be as verbal as other people. I don't want to be an obstacle," she said.
The judge asked her again, "Is a core concern here your ability to understand language and the concepts."
"Yes," she said.
"And you feel you can't get beyond that," Richardson asked the juror.
"Right," she said.
The judge left the court room to read case law and then returned to dismiss the juror, finding that because of her "insufficient command of the English language," her ability to further proceed was impaired.
Richardson then selected from a basket the number of one of five alternate jurors and sent the new juror, a man, along with the rest of the jurors to begin deliberations anew.
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