Judge Won’t Call All-Deaf Jury Defense Argued Only Those Who Speak Sign Language Could Understand The Nuances Of Testimony From Deaf Defendant, Accuser

The defendant in the rape trial is deaf. So is his accuser. And so are most of the character witnesses.

Therefore, argued Riverside County public defender Mara Feiger last week, if the jury members impaneled for the rape trial are to judge the sign-language testimony accurately, they should be deaf as well, or at least speak American Sign Language.

Feiger’s pretrial request went down to defeat Tuesday when Judge Gordon R. Burkhart of Superior Court in Riverside ruled against it.

But Feiger and advocates for the deaf said the request served to highlight the particular disadvantages that deaf people like the defendant, 19-year-old Jesse Manual Macias, face in court, judged by people whose whole way of communicating is deeply different.

“Sign language is really unlike any other language in that we’re relying so very heavily on the interpreter to convey the whole message,” Feiger said in a telephone interview Tuesday afternoon.

When witnesses who speak other languages testify through interpreters, the jury can nonetheless hear their intonation and emotion through the foreign syllables.

But American Sign Language, interpreters say, depends powerfully on body language and hand positions that cannot easily be captured in words and that jurors watching a witness testify will not often understand.

“With sign language, a lot of inflection and expression is based on body language and it’s very difficult to translate to spoken language,” said Suzette Schuster, an interpreter for Lifesigns, a Riverside-based offshoot of the Greater Los Angeles Council on Deafness.

Feiger, the public defender, said she decided to pursue the request for a special jury after hearing about preliminary testimony by the 18-year-old woman who is accusing Macias of raping her this June, back when both were seniors at the California School for the Deaf in Riverside.

After the woman testified, Feiger said, deaf supporters of Macias said they doubted her account, telling the lawyer: “It’s obvious by the way she is signing.”

“So I grabbed the ball and ran with it,” she said.

Her argument centered on legal instructions for juries telling them they were to be the sole judges of whether a witness was believable, and that in deciding, they could take into account the demeanor and manner of a witness.

Jurors are supposed to use their life experiences to determine if a witness is telling the truth, she said, but those who do not speak sign language would not have the experience or ability to judge.

Deputy District Attorney Cynthia Brewer disagreed, though she noted that it was always a concern that nuances might get lost in courtroom interpretation.

But, she said, “when you’re guaranteed a jury of your peers, you’re not guaranteed a jury of similarly situated people, be they all deaf or blind or black or Caucasian or Hispanic.”

Nuances of expression become especially important in the case of Macias because his defense rests on the credibility of the woman, Feiger said. She said her client’s defense was that whatever happened was consensual.

The woman had testified earlier she had cried out for help during the incident but the other students at the school, being deaf, had not heard her.