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Case 1:20-cr-00330-PAE Document615_ Filed 02/24/22 Page 29 of 49
circumstances will ever recur”). And the New Hampshire state decision prominently cited by the
defendant does not hold that a mandatory presumption of bias applies based on similarity of
experiences, but merely finds that the trial court acted within its discretion when it found, after a
post-verdict hearing, that the juror’s demeanor, actions, and communications before, during, and
after trial demonstrated bias. See State v. Ashfar, 196 A.3d 93, 94 (N.H. 2018); see also id. at 98
(noting that “when called for jury service in another sexual assault case involving an alleged victim
who was a minor, Juror 6 acknowledged that he could not sit on that jury due to his feelings about
his daughter; and . . . there appears to be little in the way of logical explanation for how he could
have differentiated between the two cases.”).
Moreover, this Court’s handling of similarly situated jurors in this case is again relevant to
the hypothetical inquiry at issue. See, e.g., Torres, 128 F.3d at 45 (implied bias finding based on
“average man” test). If it were correct that a juror’s experience with sexual abuse required a
mandatory presumption of bias in a sexual abuse case, the defense would have sought to strike,
and the Court would have struck, the numerous other jurors who reported a history of sexual abuse
(or at the very least would have pursued detailed follow-up questioning to establish the particulars
of the abuse and the extent of any similarities to the charged conduct). But that is not what
happened here: Where jurors indicated a history of sexual abuse or harassment, the Court
conducted a targeted follow-up inquiry, focused on whether they can be fair and impartial. And
rightly so: It is not the law in this Circuit that a victim of sexual abuse is presumed to be biased.
On that score, it bears emphasizing how prevalent sexual abuse is, and how common federal trials
involving sex trafficking and child enticement are. If it were the law that survivors of sexual
abuse—who make up a significant percentage of the prospective jury pool in any trial—could not
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Document Details
| Filename | DOJ-OGR-00009148.jpg |
| File Size | 724.1 KB |
| OCR Confidence | 94.8% |
| Has Readable Text | Yes |
| Text Length | 2,176 characters |
| Indexed | 2026-02-03 17:42:03.024900 |