Politics on the Hudson

New York’s highest court gave defendants a victory today on the issue of dismissing jurors.

The case, People v. Alfonso Dukes, centered on the Schenectady resident’s appeal of reckless endangerment charges for allegedly firing two shots at a man romantically involved with his girlfriend. But the legal issue for the Court of Appeals hinged on whether a local court properly dismissed a juror who said she may have worked with the other man, Marcel Davis, at a nursing center for a time and might have heard that Davis in an incident “involving a gun.’’ The juror told the Schenectady judge, however, she was “100 percent sure’’ she could be impartial.

The high court said the dismissal of the juror was improper—a serious enough error to order Dukes a new trial. In a 7-0 decision, the court said: “The (Schenectady) court failed to determine that juror number three was grossly unqualified—or indeed, unqualified at all.”