Prosecutors say a Brooklyn man’s sentencing last week to 25 years in prison for murder stems from New York’s first trial under new anonymous jury rules that allowed the court to keep the jurors’ names from the defendant.
Trial judges have long been able to keep jurors’ identities at least partially private — for instance, keeping them secret from the general public, or shielding their addresses from disclosure. But in 2024, the state Legislature passed a law giving courts leeway to extend those protections further — with its sponsor saying rules needed to better align with federal standards, and shield jurors from dangerous defendants in an era when personally identifiable information is easy to come by.
Prosecutors alleged Saalik Jackson, 47, tried to influence jurors from his jail cell on Rikers Island during a first trial, resulting in a hung jury. His second trial, leading to this week’s sentence, could prove an early test case for how judges apply the new law and whether it will stand up in court. Jackson’s attorney said at trial she expects the decision to shield jurors’ names won’t stand up on appeal.
The case stemmed from the May 2021 fatal shooting of Brandon Washington, a 42-year-old man who was riding a moped through Bedford-Stuyvesant at the time, according to the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Prosecutors said Washington was going about his day, “searching for a barbershop to get a haircut before attending a memorial service for his grandfather,” when Jackson opened fire, killing him.
Officials say Jackson fled the scene, but was arrested in February 2022. His first trial ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked with one holdout following days of deliberations, according to prosecutors.
As the case moved toward the second trial, prosecutors asked Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Elizabeth Warin to make use of the law. They argued, based on intercepted phone calls, that during the first trial, Jackson had paid at least $1,000 to a third party, routed through his girlfriend, to “work on” the case. On one call, prosecutors told the court, Jackson spelled out the name of a specific juror letter by letter so the information could be passed along.
Jackson’s attorney, Samantha Chorny, fought the shield maneuver, arguing that there had been no legal findings of jury tampering and no arrests. “They are relying on conversations that could be interpreted in many ways,” she said.
Warin ultimately agreed to empanel an anonymous jury, which delivered a guilty verdict after just an hour-and-a-half of deliberation, according to the DA’s office.
Anonymous juries are not new, according to legal experts, and degrees of anonymity have varied in both local and federal courts. The earliest example appears to be a 1977 organized crime case against a New York drug kingpin. At the time, a federal judge in Manhattan granted the jury broad anonymity — not even the attorneys knew the jurors’ names.
The concern was straightforward: The judge wanted to protect the jury from a potentially dangerous defendant. Today, however, the threat has expanded, experts say.
“Back in the mob trial, the danger was just from the defendants, right? And maybe the defendant’s cronies,” said Jayne Ressler, a professor at Brooklyn Law School who has written about anonymous juries. “But now it’s everybody. It’s the broad public.”
The Internet and social media have made access to information about a person easily searchable with just a name, Ressler said. She noted that during Donald Trump’s recent hush-money trial, New York Judge Juan Merchan withheld the jurors’ names from the press and public, though Trump and his attorneys were allowed to know their identities.
“There wasn’t really a risk of Donald Trump having any retribution against the jurors,” she said. “But man, did his supporters go bananas.”
New York state courts lacked clear authority to match what federal courts could do, according to Assemblymember Charles Lavine, who sponsored the bill two years ago to align the standards.
“There was no precise power given to state court judges to impanel truly anonymous juries where their names were not known and their addresses were not known,” Lavine said. Under the new law, the court can withhold jurors’ names and addresses from a defendant, as was done in Jackson’s case. The law also requires courts to instruct jurors that their anonymous selection cannot be used to infer the defendant’s guilt.
“Sadly, it is a tool that we have to have today in our arsenal in order to be able to protect the integrity of our judiciary system, which is under needless and constant attack,” Lavine said.
When the question of an anonymous jury came up during the Jackson case, his attorney, Chorny, warned Warin that “if you were to make any ruling in favor of the people’s application, I respectfully believe it will be overturned by the Appellate Division,” according to court transcripts.
Earlier, Warin herself had noted that she had found almost no precedent for the order in New York state courts, with the exception of the Trump proceedings. But she was not deterred.
“If I get overturned because I made a mistake, that is part of the process in working,” she said.
Ressler says the chances of any given case being appealed successfully based on the use of an anonymous jury are slim.
“The vast majority of them, if not all of them, the appellate court says, we leave the decision to be anonymous to the trial judge, and if the trial judge thought that anonymity was warranted, we accept that,” Ressler said.
That deference reflects a broader shift in how courts have come to view the practice, said Paula Hannaford-Agor, director emeritus of the Center for Jury Studies at the National Center for State Courts.
“The trend has definitely been to be more accepting of anonymous juries,” she said, “to preserve the integrity of the trial process and to protect the safety and well-being of jurors.”
