The trial against Johnny Depp and Amber Heard may technically be over, but it’s becoming clearer by the day that we’re not even close to a legal resolution. On Friday, Heard’s lawyers filed a 43-page motion in an attempt to get the court to overturn the more than ten million dollar judgment against their client. The filing cites a number of different reasons why they believe the conviction should be thrown out, including problems with Juror 15.
We have no idea who Juror 15 is. His identity is protected by law, but according to Heard’s legal team, his inclusion on the jury may have “compromised” her due process. That’s because they say his age was listed incorrectly on the jury list. He is apparently identified as having been born in 1945, but looks much younger and appears, according to their estimation, to have actually been born decades later. They want to verify that he actually received a summons to appear and they want to verify that he was properly vetted by the court. Here’s a quote from Law and Crime Documentation…
The court must examine whether Juror 15 properly served on the jury. In the juror list panel sent to counsel prior to voir dire, the Court noted that the person who would later be designated as Juror 15 had a year of birth of 1945. However, Juror 15 was clearly born after 1945 .Publicly available information indicates that he appears to have been born in 1970. This discrepancy raises the question of whether Juror 15 actually received a jury summons and whether he was properly vetted by the court to serve on the jury.
In the same court filing, Hurd’s team acknowledged that juror errors are not usually grounds for overturning a conviction, but they argued that there was a possibility that juror 15 was not who he said he was, which they said would be due process violation. The claim is just one in a long list of issues they face in this latest filing.
Amber Heard’s team claims that Johnny Depp didn’t actually prove that he suffered that much financial hardship because of the publication. They claim the actor is highly unlikely to appear in Pirates of the Caribbean 6 and claim Depp himself has said he wouldn’t take the role for a million alpacas. Additionally, her team argues that what really matters here is whether Heard believes she was abused. If she believed her own claims, jurors could not find that she acted with malice, and argued that Depp’s legal team never proved that she did not believe her own claims.
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard were only married from 2015 to 2017, but their relationship endured through a series of lawsuits and legal troubles afterward. Most recently, Depp sued Heard for defamation after she posted a post claiming she was a victim of domestic violence. The televised six-week trial proved hugely popular with the general public, with millions watching as both men took the stand and hurled accusations at each other, ranging from abuse to drug use to willful bedwetting.
The jury ultimately awarded mostly in favor of Johnny Depp. The jury decided that she had acted maliciously and defamed him on several counts and awarded him more than fifteen million dollars in damages, which was later reduced to ten million and change. They also ruled in her favor on one count related to a statement made by Depp’s former lawyer and awarded her $2 million. There was some hope that the two would settle and move on after the trial, but this latest request seems to indicate that their legal situation will continue.
There’s no word on whether an investigation will be launched into Juror 15, but if something shady comes up, expect to hear about it.
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