“The juror was a father of two who initially declared that he could fairly decide the fate of a man charged with viewing child pornography, despite strong reservations. Hours later, he left a telephone message with a courtroom deputy:  “There is just no way I’m going to be able to view these pictures or video.”

Even though the man kept insisting he wouldn’t look at evidence at the heart of the case, U.S. District Judge David Dowd Jr. of Ohio’s Northern District kept him on the panel. That decision cost the judge a rebuke by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which on Jan. 7 vacated Dowd’s 14-year prison sentence for Trent Shepard.

“[T]he role of the district judge is not to gloss over serious issues for the sake of preventing additional work for the court,” Senior Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey wrote, joined by judges R. Guy Cole Jr. and Julia Smith Gibbons. Trial judges, she stressed, must safeguard the accused’s constitutional rights “from the whims of public opinion, prejudice, and expediency.”

Read more here (login required).

The opinion itself can be found here (login required).