He tainted the whole jury with that, which is what caused the mistrial. The court is going to have to go through the whole process again, so salaries for the prosecutor, the bailiffs, court reporters and judge, plus make the defendant pay for another defense (or make the public defenders pay for another defense), and the court now has to find another jury with no ties to this specific church, which gets harder with each case.
All because a juror could not follow directions and decided to be a private Matlock or his own religious authority or whatever the documents were. If I let my cynic freak flag fly, I might suspect the juror did it deliberately to cause a mistrial. That's not unknown.
I know of at least one case where there's a very strong chance that juror actions outside of the scope of the jury room and evidence as presented resulted in a life sentence for an innocent person, because the juror decided to go do her own "drive test" with faulty information. Which was discovered years later, after the innocent person's legal appeals were exhausted. He'll spend life in prison for the simple crime of being a typical teenage asshole who had a vengeful ex and lived in the middle of a gossipy small town.
The bigger issue with juries is that we, as a society, do not value the service. Under the draft, a draftee and a volunteer went through the same training, got paid the same amount of money, had the exact same opportunities after their service was completed. We expect jury duty to be like a draft of the citizenry for a few hours, days or weeks, but we don't compensate that usurpation of time and energy. We expect jurors to donate their time, no matter their circumstances.
About half of any jury pool are hourly workers, who, if they don't work, don't get paid, and then don't make the mortgage/rent/groceries. Which makes that group extremely wary of jury duty. Employers are not allowed to fire employees for jury duty, but in most at-will states, someone who is hourly and gets a grand jury duty summons is likely to get fired. Some employers pay their employees on jury duty, but it's not required. The "compensation" most jurors get doesn't even approach minimum wage. Salaried workers or those with paid time off can use their PTO, but that can mean they don't have the paid time off to take care of a sick child or go see family during the holidays or have to cancel a planned family vacation. Being the sole caretaker for a child or an elder does not get someone out of jury duty. Drop-in daycare for children is rare, and finding a caretaker for a child or children can be difficult, but for elders? It can be impossible. Adults caring for parents with dementia are often screwed, if dementia manifests as paranoia around strangers, or they've lost control of social boundaries or is incontinent.
Want to improve the jury pool? Make it a real public service job that pays around the median local wage, for which one may volunteer, and in volunteering, agrees to serve on any jury within a region. Set a minimum and maximum time limit - one can serve for no less than 6 months at a stretch, and no more than 4 total lifetime years - and provide training in the critical thinking required to understand complex expert testimony, legal process and implicit biases. Both attorneys get a randomly assigned pool of 30 from the current standing pool of anonymized potential jurors, and from that paper pool, must agree on 14, without seeing anyone or being able to exclude based on career. (Because racism and sexism are serious problems in jury selection, and many prosecutors seek to exclude potential jurors with higher education because they don't want jurors who might question the science.) Allow people to commit to service at transition points in their careers. Allow the jurors to opt out of certain types of cases, but not opt out of any individual case. (Of course, this would be much easier to establish once we have a UBI, but it can be done without one. We just have to pay for it.)
When the jury rules we follow were first established in English common law under the Plantagenets, there was very little educational difference between local magistrates, sheriffs and the local jury pool. Often, magistrates and sheriffs were just as illiterate as the smallholders and artisans who served. Even into the 19th century, the differences were small and there was little establishment of forensic evidence. Now? We expect a roofer, a line cook, a stay at home parent, a mechanic, a marketing assistant and a retired accountant to understand microbiology, DNA analysis, smoke patterns, cell tower orientations, and anything else that might be relevant, being served by groups of attorneys who can be highly skilled at manipulation. That's making for worse juries.
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