At about three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, February 28, 1852, twelve men in Cincinnati retired to decide whether a young English-born nurse named Nancy Farrer should hang. They did not finish until six o’clock on Tuesday evening. In between, according to affidavits that reached the Supreme Court of Ohio, some of them leaned out of an open window to answer questions from people on the sidewalk below. One of them read aloud from a newspaper that had printed the judge’s instructions on insanity. The Supreme Court of Ohio later ordered the case tried again, and the jury’s conduct was the one ground on which all three justices in the majority agreed.
The second trial was never held, and in these seven cases a jury-misconduct claim that ended in a fresh trial is the exception. A defense lawyer who goes looking in the jury room is looking for something specific: a juror who learned what the evidence rules were meant to keep out, who discussed the case with outsiders, who took a book or a newspaper or a bottle into deliberations, or a sheriff who let the panel scatter for the night. Courts treat the finding of misconduct and the finding of harm as two separate steps. In the cases below, judges more than once agreed that something had gone wrong in the jury room and then declined to disturb the verdict.
Seven cases show the range of outcomes. One produced a mistrial and a second trial early the next year. One produced a reversal and no second trial. One produced a vacated death sentence that the state’s highest court put back by a single vote. Four ended with a court declining to order a new trial.
Three members of one Cincinnati household died within a few weeks of each other in the closing weeks of 1851: a mother and two of her small sons. A doctor at the post-mortem examination of the youngest boy said he had taken poison, and an analysis later reached the same conclusion about the mother, both boys and a woman from an earlier household where the family’s new nurse had worked. The nurse was Nancy Farrer, born July 24, 1832, in Lancashire, who had come to Ohio as a child, and who, according to witnesses, could read a little but could not write.
On January 10, 1852, a Hamilton County grand jury returned two indictments against her, and on January 15 she was arraigned on two more. Between them they charged her with four deaths. A second nurse from the earlier household, identified in the court record by the initials A. B., was indicted with her for that death. Farrer was tried for only one: the death of two-year-old James Wesley Forrest. Judge A. W. G. Carter presided over a trial that ran from February 18 to March 2, 1852.
Her court-appointed lawyers included a young Cincinnati attorney named Rutherford B. Hayes, later governor of Ohio and president of the United States. Hayes called the case "the criminal case of the term," and Watt P. Marchman, director of the Hayes Library, reconstructed it in a long article for the journal Ohio History from the diaries, letters and newspaper coverage. The defense, as Judge Carter summarized it for the jury, made two arguments. The evidence was circumstantial and pointed at least as strongly toward someone else, and even if she had administered the poison she was not responsible, because of imbecility or insanity. Carter’s charge on insanity, according to a 1987 University of Dayton Law Review article on Ohio’s insanity defense, turned on whether she could tell right from wrong.
Testimony closed on February 28. The jury returned on Monday morning to ask for further instruction on imbecility and went out again. At about six o’clock on Tuesday, March 2, it returned a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree.
Before Farrer was sentenced, Judge Carter tried the second nurse. Marchman, citing the Cincinnati Gazette of March 1852, records that Farrer had told Hayes privately that the other woman had taught her how to give the poison and had agreed to swear to it. On the witness stand she instead cleared the woman of any knowledge. The jury acquitted without leaving the box. When Hayes later asked why she had lied to him, Farrer said that one woman was enough to hang and that she had not meant to hang the other.
Hayes spent two days arguing a motion for a new trial. The grounds, he wrote to his uncle on April 5, 1852, concerned the conduct of juries while they deliberate, a subject he thought "very interesting to the profession." The motion was overruled. His diary for April 1 records only that he had argued the case, that she was convicted, and that he had nonetheless gained some laurels on the motion. Marchman notes that Hayes and a co-counsel named Hoy were to share a $150 fee and that Hayes received $75 from the Court of Common Pleas. Judge Carter sentenced Farrer to death.
The appeal was argued at the December 1853 term. Hayes argued for a new trial, and the state’s attorney general, George E. Pugh, argued against it. On December 15, 1853, the Supreme Court of Ohio decided Farrer v. State, 2 Ohio St. 54. Justices John A. Corwin, Allen G. Thurman and Rufus P. Ranney voted to reverse and order a new trial. Chief Justice Thomas W. Bartley dissented. Each wrote separately.
The one ground on which all three in the majority agreed was the conduct of the jury. The affidavits filed with the motion showed that during the long deliberation some jurors had talked through the open windows of their room with people on the sidewalk below. No talk about the merits was shown, but people outside had asked whether the jury had agreed, whether it was likely to agree and how it stood, and some of those questions were answered from the jury room. One juror asked the prosecuting attorney to have a change of clothes sent to another juror. Two jurors were given liquor, one of them possibly on a doctor’s prescription. And one juror obtained a newspaper that printed part of the judge’s charge. A deputy sheriff took the paper away when he saw it, but by then a juror had read the insanity section aloud, and the jury had used that printed version in its discussions for several hours before reaching its verdict. The newspaper’s account of the charge was conceded to be accurate.
Justice Corwin wrote that this alone required a new trial. A verdict could not stand, he held, where a jury had so far mistaken its duty as to obtain its own report of the court’s instructions. He looked to the jury rules of Ohio’s new code of procedure, which required jurors to be kept together under an officer who was not to speak with them except to ask whether they had agreed, as a fair statement of proper practice, though not as the law governing her trial. Justice Thurman agreed and added that misconduct is not always willful. Justice Ranney rested his vote on the misconduct alone.
Corwin and Thurman went further. Both thought the evidence about the earlier household’s death should not have been admitted at a trial for the death of James Wesley Forrest. Corwin said it did not prove she knew what the poison would do and only stirred prejudice. Thurman said the state could have proved her knowledge without putting other poisonings before the jury, and that such evidence hung with a deadly weight on the defense.
The new trial never took place. In December 1854 a jury in the Probate Court declared her "of unsound mind," and she was placed in an asylum at Lick Run, later transferred to Longview. By Judge Carter’s later account, she walked away one day and was never traced. Hayes, in a letter of January 22, 1855, counted the lunacy verdict as the acquittal in his first life case. In law she stands as a woman whose only verdict was set aside. She was never retried, and no jury ever again passed on her guilt.
Glennon E. Engleman practiced dentistry in south St. Louis before anyone proved he had killed for money. When Sophie Marie Barrera, who owned a dental laboratory and was suing him over an unpaid bill, died in January 1980, his former wife went to federal agents. The conversations she then recorded with him became the core of a federal case and of two Missouri capital murder prosecutions.
A federal grand jury returned a 17-count indictment. One count charged Engleman alone in connection with Barrera’s death. The other sixteen charged Engleman and Robert Handy with conspiracy and mail fraud in a scheme to collect insurance on the life of Peter J. Halm Jr. Missouri charged Engleman with capital murder in both deaths. Both men asked to move the federal trial out of St. Louis, and on March 14, 1980, U.S. District Judge William L. Hungate agreed. He wrote that the case had received saturation coverage and that the spread of inflammatory publicity had created an atmosphere of widespread public prejudice. Among the headlines filed with the motion was "Dentist Is Suspect In Other Killings." The case was ordered transferred to the District of Minnesota.
The Missouri capital case that followed Barrera’s death was moved out of the city of St. Louis to Gasconade County. Its first trial opened in November 1980. A jury was chosen, kept together and heard five witnesses. On the morning of November 13, 1980, the judge declared a mistrial at Engleman’s request after the sheriff failed to keep the jurors together overnight.
This is the cleanest example of a trial thrown out because of how a jury was handled, and it is notable for how little it changed. The case was tried again in January 1981, and the second jury convicted Engleman of capital murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without eligibility for probation or parole until he had served at least 50 years. United Press International reported in 1984 that he escaped a death sentence in the Barrera case because the jury could not agree on punishment.
On appeal Engleman argued that the second trial violated double jeopardy, that two jurors should have been excused, that the judge had made a prejudicial remark about the case’s fame, that photographs and recordings should have been kept out, and that he should have had an alibi instruction. The Supreme Court of Missouri rejected every claim. It held that the recordings, made with his wife’s consent, violated neither the Fourth Amendment nor the Missouri Constitution, since a person who confides in someone takes the risk that the confidant will record the conversation. It identified the replaying of one inaudible tape as an error but not one that denied him a fair trial. It affirmed the judgment on June 14, 1982, in an opinion by Special Judge John E. Parrish, and denied rehearing on July 6.
His mistrial, in other words, bought him a second chance to be convicted, and the court that reviewed it saw no constitutional bar. The retrial was not a remedy for a defendant. It was a repair to a procedure.
The federal litigation produced a different kind of second trial. In the Halm case a jury convicted Engleman and Handy on all 15 mail fraud counts and the conspiracy count. Engleman received an aggregate term of 30 years and Handy 20. In a separate trial a jury convicted Engleman on the count tied to Barrera’s death, and he received another 30 years, to run after the first. On May 6, 1981, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Roy L. Stephenson, affirmed both of Engleman’s convictions. For Handy it ordered a new trial. The reason was not jury misconduct. The panel held that the trial judge should have severed his case, because evidence of an earlier death that had nothing to do with him was highly prejudicial to a man who had been "in no way involved" in that scheme, and because one of Engleman’s recorded statements had been made after the conspiracy was over and could not be used against Handy. Rehearing was denied on June 3, 1981.
The Missouri Supreme Court affirmed Engleman’s Halm conviction on June 30, 1983. The recordings, the transcripts used with them and the instruction on immunized witnesses were each upheld. In 1985 he pleaded guilty in Madison County, Illinois, to the killings of a farm couple and their son. He died in a Missouri prison in 1999, at 71.
The nearest thing to a win on juror misconduct among these defendants came in a California courtroom, and it was undone by a single vote.
David Joseph Carpenter was convicted by two juries of seven murders on park trails in Marin and Santa Cruz counties in 1980 and 1981. A Los Angeles County jury, hearing the Santa Cruz case, convicted him in July 1984 and chose death. The five Marin County murders were tried separately. At Carpenter’s request, that case was moved from Marin to San Diego County because of publicity, and the trial opened on January 5, 1988, before Superior Court Judge Herbert B. Hoffman. Its transcript ran to nearly 16,000 pages.
In Los Angeles the defense had not disputed that he was the gunman. In San Diego he contested identity and testified, denying the crimes. His lawyers argued that a man who looked like him had committed them. The jurors were not told that he had already been convicted and sentenced to death for the Santa Cruz killings.
Partway through the San Diego guilt phase, the jury’s foreperson learned of those convictions and the death sentence, either from newspapers or through her husband. On March 26, 1988, at a resort in San Diego County, she talked about the case with two people who were not jurors and said, in substance, that the jurors were not supposed to know about the earlier convictions. On May 10, 1988, after about seven hours of deliberation, the jury of seven women and five men convicted him on all counts. After a penalty phase it returned death, and Judge Hoffman sentenced him on July 19, 1988.
Carpenter’s lawyers filed a petition for habeas corpus in the trial court on September 28, 1988. At a hearing, the foreperson denied the conversation. Judge Hoffman ruled her denial was perjury, concluded that her misconduct had prejudiced Carpenter, and vacated the death judgment. It was the result a defense lawyer hopes for. The state’s director of corrections appealed directly to the Supreme Court of California.
On March 6, 1995, in In re Carpenter, 9 Cal.4th 634, the court reversed by four votes to three. Justice Armand Arabian, writing for the majority, agreed that the foreperson had committed misconduct by receiving outside information and discussing the case. But he held that the trial court was wrong to find prejudice: "before a unanimous verdict is set aside, the likelihood of bias under either test must be substantial." The petition was provisionally denied, leaving him free to raise the issue again on appeal. Justice Mosk, joined by Chief Justice Lucas and Justice Kennard, dissented and would have left the judgment vacated.
The issue came back on the automatic appeal. On November 29, 1999, in People v. Carpenter, 21 Cal.4th 1016, the court affirmed the San Diego judgment, in an opinion by Justice Chin. Justice Mosk dissented again. Because "the jury foreperson was demonstrably biased against him at trial," he wrote, "I cannot now join in affirming the judgment of death on appeal." Rehearing was denied on January 19, 2000, and the United States Supreme Court declined review on October 2, 2000.
The Los Angeles judgment had been affirmed earlier, on April 28, 1997, in People v. Carpenter, 15 Cal.4th 312, with every claim rejected. Carpenter then took both cases to federal court, where Judge Maxine M. Chesney of the Northern District of California has worked through his claims in groups. On December 15, 2023, she denied a set of claims about the conduct of jurors at the Los Angeles trial. Docket listings read on October 22, 2026, show no final federal ruling in either case.
Of the seven, Carpenter’s came closest. A trial judge, after hearing live testimony, concluded that a juror had lied under oath about outside contact and set aside a death sentence. A seven-member court split four to three on the question of harm, and the sentence went back into force.
Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house in downtown Sacramento for elderly, ill and disabled tenants. In November 1988 seven deaths came to light there, and she was charged with nine murders. After a change of venue, a Monterey County jury convicted her in 1993 of the first-degree murders of Dorothy Miller and Benjamin Fink, with the multiple-murder special circumstance, and of the second-degree murder of Leona Carpenter. It could not agree on the six other counts, and a mistrial was declared on them. The prosecution later dismissed those counts, and she was never convicted of any of the six deaths.
The penalty phase went the same way. After three days of deliberation the jurors reached an impasse, and on October 13, 1993, Judge Michael Virga declared a mistrial in that phase. The jurors said they had split 7 to 5, with most favoring prison over death, United Press International reported. Prosecutors chose not to try the penalty again, so Puente, then 64, received life without parole. She died in prison on March 27, 2011, at 82.
After the verdicts, Puente’s lawyers went back to the jurors. The Sacramento County Superior Court held an evidentiary hearing on her juror-misconduct claims in 1998, and on September 25, 1998, it ruled that there had been no misconduct and denied the petition, according to the Center for Sacramento History’s guide to the case records. A jury that had failed to agree on six counts and on the sentence was, by the court’s own assessment, a jury that had done its job. No retrial followed, because there was nothing to retry on the counts of conviction. The unresolved counts were abandoned by the prosecution, which is a different thing from a new trial ordered by a court.
John E. Robinson Sr. was arrested at his house in Olathe, Kansas, on June 2, 2000, on sexual assault and theft charges, and capital murder charges followed on June 13. A Johnson County jury convicted him on October 29, 2002, of the aggravated kidnapping and capital murder of Suzette Trouten, the capital murder of Izabela Lewicka, the first-degree premeditated murder of Lisa Stasi, felony theft, and aggravated interference with Stasi’s parental custody. The jury recommended death on both capital counts, and in January 2003 the court imposed death on each. In October 2003 he pleaded guilty in Cass County, Missouri, to five counts of first-degree murder and received life without parole on each.
His direct appeal was heard in March 2015 and decided on November 6, 2015, in a 415-page opinion by Justice Caleb Stegall. The court affirmed the capital murder conviction for Trouten and the death sentence on it. It reversed the capital murder conviction for Lewicka and the first-degree murder conviction for Stasi as multiplicitous with the Trouten count: the same killings had been used to support each charge, so the extra convictions punished him twice for the same offense, in violation of double jeopardy. Stegall wrote that the ruling did not in any way clear Robinson of those deaths, according to KOAM’s 2026 account. The opinion acknowledged errors at the trial, Courthouse News Service reported, but held that together they did not substantially prejudice him. Justice Lee Johnson dissented. It was the first time the Kansas Supreme Court had upheld a death sentence since the state restored capital punishment in 1994.
Robinson is, in other words, a defendant whose appeal identified real defects and still left the central verdict intact. The defects were in the charging structure, not the jury room, and the two double-jeopardy reversals did nothing to shorten his sentence.
He then brought a post-conviction challenge in Johnson County. District Judge Robert Wonnell rejected it, and the Kansas Supreme Court heard his appeal in September 2026. His lawyer, Madeline Cohen, argued that his trial lawyers had not understood state law on how jurors weigh the death penalty after a guilty verdict and had not challenged the single aggravating factor, the "common scheme" theory. She acknowledged that he was unlikely to be acquitted of murder but argued that he could have avoided a death sentence. Assistant District Attorney Jacob Gontesky said the defense team had been experienced and multidisciplinary and that Robinson had not shown a reasonable probability of a different result. Justice Stegall said he struggled with faulting lawyers for not anticipating a later change in the law. The court gave no decision that day. Governor Laura Kelly had denied his request to commute the death sentence on June 18, 2026. As of September 15, 2026, he was 82, held at El Dorado Correctional Facility, with the appeal pending.
Kenneth Allen McDuff was 20 when he was tried in Fort Worth in 1966 for the killings of three teenagers. On November 15, 1966, a Star-Telegram photographer recorded him entering Criminal District Court after the jurors reported that they had reached a verdict. They sentenced him to death. On December 27, 1966, the paper photographed people attending his hearing on a motion for a new trial. Sources differ on the scope of the 1966 judgments: one regional account says he was sentenced to die for the murder of Robert Brand, KWTX reported in 2024 that he was convicted in the deaths of all three and received three death sentences, and Texas Monthly in 1998 described the conviction as being for the murder of Edna Sullivan. No published account settles the question.
After the United States Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia his sentence was commuted to life. McDuff became eligible for parole in 1976, and for 13 years the board turned him down. Gary Cartwright, writing in Texas Monthly in 1992 from board records, reports that he won a single vote in 1979, 1980, 1984 and 1985, short of the two he needed. In 1977 his family hired a lawyer, Gary Jackson. In 1979 Jackson sent the board a 26-page letter, and in 1980 he filed a habeas corpus petition claiming jury misconduct at the 1966 trial and arguing that Roy Green, a murder suspect in the same case, was the real killer. At a 1982 evidentiary hearing in Fort Worth, the claims were rejected.
That was a plain refusal, and it matters because of what followed. In 1981 McDuff offered a parole board member, Glenn Heckmann, $10,000 for his vote. Heckmann reported it, and McDuff was convicted of bribery, his third felony conviction, but Cartwright says the jury misunderstood the habitual-offender instructions and gave him two years, time he had already served. In 1988 the board voted to parole him and then rescinded the decision after protest letters from the trial judge and the prosecutor. In October 1989, when the Texas parole board was under court orders to release prisoners at a rapid pace, a panel voted to let him go. He returned to prison in 1990 and was released again on December 6, 1990.
By May 1992 he was a federal fugitive, sought in the deaths of women around Waco and Austin. A jury in Harris County, where the Waco case was tried on a change of venue, convicted him of the capital murder of Melissa Ann Northrup in 1993 and sentenced him to death. He was also convicted of the capital murder of Colleen Reed. The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the Northrup conviction in 1997, certiorari was denied in 1998, and federal habeas relief was denied in October and November 1998. He was executed at Huntsville on November 17, 1998, at 52. A former chairman of the parole board was later convicted of perjury in the investigation that followed, Texas Monthly reported in 1998.
A claim about the 1966 jury, in other words, was pressed in 1980 by a family that wanted him out, and a court that heard evidence on it said no. The claim did not free him. The parole system did, nine years later.
Cary Stayner, a maintenance worker at a motel outside Yosemite National Park, confessed to the FBI on July 24, 1999, after his arrest at a resort in Wilton, south of Sacramento. In September 2000 he pleaded guilty in federal court to the murder of Joie Armstrong, a Yosemite Institute instructor, and was sentenced to life without parole. A Santa Clara County jury in San Jose convicted him in August 2002 of three murders and a kidnapping; the victims were a mother, her teenage daughter and the daughter’s friend. The defense conceded that he had killed them and asked for second-degree verdicts. On September 16, 2002, the jury ruled him sane, after less than four hours. It returned a death verdict in October.
At sentencing in December 2002, Judge Thomas C. Hastings rejected defense claims of juror misconduct and denied the motions for a new trial and to reduce the sentence, according to a report in The Union of Grass Valley. He sentenced Stayner to death, plus a consecutive term of 45 years.
The same issue came back on the automatic appeal, People v. Stayner, No. S112146, which was pending for more than two decades. His appointed lawyer, Andrew Parnes, raised claims that included juror misconduct. The court heard argument in Sacramento on February 4, 2026.
On April 30, 2026, it affirmed the judgment in its entirety. Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero wrote the opinion, joined by Justices Corrigan, Liu, Kruger and Groban and by Justice Adams of the Court of Appeal, sitting by assignment. The court wrote that it had assumed error but identified no prejudice. Those few words are the hinge on which many of these cases turn. A court can accept that something went wrong and still decline to give the defendant what he asked for.
Put side by side, the seven cases sort into three outcomes. In Nancy Farrer’s case and Glennon Engleman’s, a court acted: the Ohio justices reversed a death verdict because jurors had talked out of a window and read a newspaper, and a Missouri judge declared a mistrial because the sheriff let the jurors scatter overnight. Only Engleman was tried again. Farrer was spared a second trial by a lunacy verdict and an asylum.
In David Carpenter’s case a judge acted and a higher court undid it, by one vote, on the question of harm rather than the question of fact. The foreperson’s misconduct was accepted by every judge who looked at it. What divided them was whether it mattered.
In four cases courts looked and declined. Puente’s 1998 hearing ended with a ruling that no misconduct had occurred. McDuff’s 1982 hearing rejected a claim about a jury that had sat sixteen years earlier. Robinson’s appeal produced a 415-page opinion that acknowledged errors and left the death sentence in place. Stayner’s claims were rejected by the trial judge in 2002 and by the California Supreme Court in 2026, which assumed error and identified no prejudice.
Of the retrials ordered here, only Farrer’s rested on what jurors themselves did, and it was never held. The others came from a sheriff’s lapse in Missouri and a trial judge’s mistake about severance in Robert Handy’s federal case.
• 1852, February 18 to March 2: Nancy Farrer tried in Cincinnati for the death of James Wesley Forrest; guilty verdict March 2.
• 1852, April: motion for a new trial argued over two days and overruled; sentence of hanging.
• 1853, December 15: Supreme Court of Ohio reverses in Farrer v. State and orders a new trial.
• 1854, December: Probate Court jury declares Farrer of unsound mind; she is placed in an asylum.
• 1966, November 15: Kenneth McDuff sentenced to death in Fort Worth.
• 1972: Furman v. Georgia; McDuff’s sentence commuted to life.
• 1980, March 14: federal trial of Glennon Engleman ordered moved to Minnesota after pretrial publicity.
• 1980, November 13: mistrial declared in the Missouri capital case after the sheriff fails to keep the jurors together overnight.
• 1980: McDuff files a habeas petition claiming jury misconduct at the 1966 trial; rejected after a 1982 hearing.
• 1981, January: second Gasconade County jury convicts Engleman of capital murder.
• 1981, May 6: Eighth Circuit affirms Engleman’s convictions and orders a new trial for Robert Handy.
• 1982, June 14: Supreme Court of Missouri affirms Engleman’s capital murder conviction.
• 1988, March 26: San Diego jury foreperson discusses David Carpenter’s case with two nonjurors.
• 1988, May 10: San Diego jury convicts Carpenter of five murders; July 19, death sentence.
• 1988, September 28: Carpenter files a habeas petition on juror misconduct; the trial judge later vacates the death judgment.
• 1993, August 26 to October 13: Puente verdicts on three counts; penalty-phase mistrial October 13.
• 1995, March 6: Supreme Court of California reverses the vacatur in In re Carpenter, 4 to 3.
• 1998, September 25: Sacramento County court rules no juror misconduct in Puente’s case.
• 1999, November 29: Supreme Court of California affirms Carpenter’s San Diego judgment; Justice Mosk dissents.
• 2002, October 29: Johnson County jury convicts John Robinson.
• 2002, August to December: Stayner convicted, ruled sane, sentenced to death; juror-misconduct claims rejected at sentencing.
• 2015, November 6: Kansas Supreme Court affirms Robinson’s Trouten capital conviction and death sentence and reverses two others as multiplicitous.
• 2023, December 15: federal court denies Carpenter’s claims about jurors at the Los Angeles trial.
• 2026, April 30: Supreme Court of California affirms Stayner’s judgment.
• 2026, June 18: Governor Kelly denies Robinson’s clemency request; September 2026, post-conviction appeal argued.