The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed the conviction of Patricia Driscoll, and called Tuesday for her to have a new trial.
After an ESPN article alleged that the head of Armed Forces Foundation, a nonprofit meant to assist veterans used the organization's money for, for instance, a plane ticket for her son and an advance of $22k to buy Moroccan rugs, the IRS took an interest, even sending an agent to the woman's child-custody hearing the next month to learn more about her finances. The Armed Forces Foundation shut down in 2016. She was charged with two counts of wire fraud, two counts of tax evasion, and one count of first-degree fraud in 2018.
At trial, the jury could not reach a verdict because of a single holdout juror. The jury returns deadlocked three separate times, and each time the judge sends them back with instructions to keep trying. The trial court's instructions are modeled after, but not identical to, the standard instructions. A little more than an hour after the third somewhat ad-libbed instruction, the jury reaches a verdict—guilty on all counts. D.C. Circuit: Those instructions likely coerced the lone holdout. The Circuit found that the district court “increasingly strayed” from approved language for jury instructions and that “taken together, under the circumstances of this case, these instructions likely coerced a lone holdout juror to surrender his or her honestly held views in favor of a unanimous verdict.” Reversed for a new trial.