Judge's failure to tell jurors not to Google defendant not a reason to overturn conviction for beating up a restaurant owner, court rules

The Supreme Judicial Court today upheld a woman's conviction for beating the co-owner of a Cambridge chicken place after she was refused permission to use its restroom after closing time.

Johnelle Brown had appealed her conviction for assault and battery and witness intimidation on several grounds, including the fact that while the judge had told her jury before deliberations to avoid any outside information about the case, she did not specifically tell them not to research it online - which Brown's lawyer argued meant they might have learned about her criminal record.

"The better practice would have been to include in the instructions a prohibition on Internet research," the state's highest court said, but then added that in this case, no harm was done.

Jurors are presumed to have followed the judge's instruction not to consider any outside information. ... Nor is there any evidence in the record to rebut that presumption. The record is devoid of evidence of any jurors using the Internet for any outside research, including discovering any information about the defendant. Without any indication that the jury were exposed to extrajudicial information about the defendant, there is no substantial risk of a miscarriage of justice in allowing the defendant's convictions to stand.

According to court records, Brown and her boyfriend showed up at Mass Chicken on Massachusetts Avenue around 2:40 a.m. on April 6, 2014, about 10 minutes after the take-out place had closed for the night. Brown asked to use the restroom, one of the owners declined to let her use it, saying she had already swabbed it down for the night, one thing led to another and a fight broke out in which Brown was convicted of punching the co-owner in the face and the other owner - the co-owner's husband - was also beaten, but not by Brown and a juice bottle was thrown and shattered.

Brown was sentenced to a year in jail, but had that suspended for two years if she could stay out of trouble, as well as paying restitution.

Brown's lawyer also argued she deserved a new trial because her trial attorney did not let her testify in her own defense that she did not punch the co-owner but rather that her hand happened to come into contact with the woman's face while she was reaching for her debit card, which she claimed the woman was holding over her head - she allegedly got it when Brown grabbed a juice bottle out of a case and proffered the card for payment.

The SJC justices, however, rejected this argument as well, saying that Brown willingly gave up the right to testify and that, in any case, she had not presented any evidence at trial to support her argument and attack the prosecution argument that she punched the woman in the face when she realized the woman was calling 911.

Brown's attorney tried another argument: That even if Brown had punched the woman in the face, that was not "witness intimidation," because at that point the woman was only a "potential witness." The court basically replied: Please.