ALBANY — Declaring the state’s four-year experiment with relaxed jury sequestration requirements a success, Chief Administrative Judge Jonathan Lippman yesterday urged lawmakers to end mandatory isolation of criminal juries in all but death penalty cases.
Discretionary sequestration in lower-level felony trials has saved the state $3.5 million since 1995, and has spared more than 14,000 jurors “the unwanted burdens of separation from home and family” without increasing the number of mistrials, he said in a report to Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye and the Legislature.
