Flight attendant to get new trial on charge she left a false bomb threat on a plane at Logan

A federal appeals court ruled today a judge had used an incorrect definition of "malice" in jury instructions and so ordered a new trial for Nancy Gray, an American Airlines flight attendant sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for leaving a note on a plane about to take off that there was a bomb on board.

Gray's conviction on a charge of "providing false information regarding a bomb threat on an airplane" required proving she acted maliciously. In a 2-1 decision, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston debated just what that means:

[C]an malice's fifty shades of meaning include "improper motive?" Former flight attendant Nancy Gray, convicted of providing false information regarding a bomb threat on an airplane, seeks to convince us that she was denied a fundamentally fair trial when her jury was instructed that malice meant "evil purpose or improper motive." Because we find that the district court's definition just won't fly, we vacate Gray's conviction and remand this case for a new trial.

According to the decision, Gray confessed to scrawling "Bomb on Board! BOS-MIA" on the inside of a lavatory storage compartment on Flight 1318, about to depart Logan on Sept. 30, 2009. She later confessed to the FBI, but denied she meant any harm to American Airlines and only wanted to prank the airport worker responsible for cleaning the lavatories, whom she claimed had called her "a fucking bitch."

The appeals court determined that the judge in the case, as requested by Gray's lawyer, should have told the jury that that means something done with "an evil purpose or motive" instead of adding they could also find her actions malicious even if they were just done with "improper motive," which is a lower standard. Prosecutors argued they both mean pretty much the same thing, so the conviction should stand, but the court disagreed, "because jury instructions demand somewhat greater precision than that required by horseshoes and hand grenades."

Complete opinion.