The judge in the Erin Patterson trial was so concerned about whether the jury had been protected from outside influence during its deliberations that he instructed authorities to try to preserve CCTV from the regional hotel where jurors were sequestered for six days.
What happened when the 12-person jury was sequestered in the same Gippsland hotel alongside police, prosecutors and media in July 2025 has become a central point in Patterson’s appeal against conviction for three murders and one attempted murder from the now infamous death cap mushroom lunch.
The Erin Patterson Jury: When Nobody Appears to Have Asked the Obvious Question
Whatever the ultimate outcome of Erin Patterson’s appeal, and without expressing any view about her guilt or innocence, the circumstances surrounding the sequestration of the jury deserve scrutiny for a reason that is considerably more basic than the competing arguments now being made in court. The problem is not simply that the jury ended up in the same hotel as police, members of the prosecution team and journalists.
The more fundamental problem is this: Who arranged the accommodation, who knew where the jury was staying, and who was responsible for checking who else was staying there? Those are not difficult questions. They are precisely the questions that should have been answered before twelve jurors were placed in a hotel during deliberations in one of the most closely watched criminal trials in the country.
The Victorian Supreme Court has confirmed that the jury was accommodated at the same hotel as a key police witness and two members of the prosecution team for most of its deliberations. The jury was kept on a separate floor and precautions were taken to prevent contact. Those precautions are relevant. They may ultimately be sufficient to establish that no improper contact occurred. But they do not answer the prior question: why was this arrangement permitted to happen at all? Indeed, the chronology makes the question more difficult rather than less.
The prosecution team apparently became aware of the accommodation problem only after the jury was already staying at the hotel, and efforts were then made to find alternative accommodation. The trial judge was subsequently informed and the jury was moved. That is the part that is difficult to explain away as merely unfortunate. This was not an unexpected meeting in a courthouse corridor. It was not a juror accidentally encountering a prosecutor in a public place. It was not an unavoidable consequence of conducting a trial in Melbourne.
This was six days of jury deliberations in a regional location, where accommodation arrangements were necessarily known in advance. Somebody had to book the rooms. Somebody had to know that those rooms were for the jury. Somebody had to know where the police and prosecution personnel were staying. And somebody should have been responsible for putting those pieces of information together. Yet apparently the pieces were not put together until the jury was already there. That is not an accusation of misconduct. It is something more mundane — and in some respects more troubling. It suggests that a basic piece of operational planning may simply have fallen through the gap between institutions.
The prosecution can quite properly say that there is no evidence of inappropriate contact. The jury keepers can say that they observed no interaction. The defence can quite properly point to the obvious risk created by the arrangement. And the Court of Appeal can decide whether the circumstances amount to a legal irregularity capable of affecting the convictions. All of those propositions can coexist. But none answers the administrative question: Why did nobody apparently ask, before the jury arrived, “Who else is staying in this hotel? “That is hardly an esoteric legal question. It is the first question anyone responsible for safeguarding a sequestered jury should have asked. And if somebody did ask it, the next question is even more obvious: Why was the jury put there anyway? There is an important distinction here between something going wrong and someone doing something wrong.
There is presently no evidence establishing deliberate misconduct or improper contact between the jury and anyone else at the hotel. The prosecution has strongly contested the suggestion that the arrangement compromised the verdicts. During the appeal, the Director of Public Prosecutions characterised the prospect of jurors breaching their obligations by communicating with outsiders as far-fetched. That may ultimately be the correct legal assessment. But a competent system should not depend upon twelve people behaving perfectly in circumstances that the system itself could have avoided creating. That is the entire point of risk management.
The subsequent difficulty with CCTV makes the episode even less comfortable. If an investigation is later required to determine whether anything occurred at the hotel, objective footage is precisely the sort of evidence one would want available. Reports that relevant hotel CCTV had already been erased mean that an independent record of what occurred was unavailable. Again, that does not establish that anything improper happened. But it illustrates the consequences of poor planning. First, an avoidable risk is created. Then the system has to investigate whether the risk resulted in anything. Then potentially useful evidence for answering that question is unavailable. At that point, describing the original decision as an unfortunate administrative oversight begins to sound rather generous. The defence has described the episode as a “catastrophic” failure. The prosecution has argued that there was no substance to that characterisation. Both descriptions arguably miss the most useful middle ground. It does not have to be catastrophic to be unacceptable. And it does not have to have affected the verdict to have been an extraordinary failure of basic planning.
The uncomfortable possibility is that nobody acted improperly because nobody was trying to do anything improper. Instead, a series of people and institutions may simply have assumed that somebody else had checked the arrangements. That is how institutional failures often occur. Everyone performs their own task. Nobody performs the simple task of standing back and asking whether all the tasks, taken together, make sense. For a sequestered jury, that should never happen.
The integrity of a jury does not depend merely upon preventing actual communication. It depends upon creating circumstances in which the possibility of communication, influence or even the appearance of influence is minimised from the outset. If separate accommodation was genuinely unavailable because of regional capacity, then that problem should have triggered an explicit contingency plan involving the court, jury administration, police and prosecution. If suitable alternative accommodation existed, the question becomes why it was not used. If somebody was responsible for checking the arrangements, the question becomes why the obvious conflict was missed. And if nobody was specifically responsible for checking them, that may be the most important finding of all. Because that would mean the problem was not one person’s misconduct.
It was a system that had no one clearly responsible for asking the obvious question. That is the criticism worth making. Not that somebody deliberately compromised a jury. Not that the verdict was necessarily affected. Not that the prosecution acted improperly. Simply that, in a trial where the independence and isolation of the jury were fundamental to the integrity of the process, the system appears to have failed to perform one of the most basic tasks imaginable: checking who else was staying in the same building.
If that is not already built into the sequestration protocols for major trials, it should be. And if it is built into them, the next question is unavoidable: Why didn’t it happen here?