A victim’s service dog. A carefully negotiated pretrial agreement. A lunch break that didn’t go according to plan. And a defendant arguing he deserved a new trial because of it.
That’s the setup in Commonwealth v. Roberts, 2026 PA Super 65, decided by the Pennsylvania Superior Court on March 30, 2026. The court affirmed the conviction — and in doing so, gave us a useful reminder of just how high the bar is for winning a new trial based on what a juror saw outside the courtroom.
The Case
Theron Roberts was a high school band director in Luzerne County charged with touching a teenage student in an inappropriate and unwanted manner over several years. The abuse allegedly escalated from lingering touches during one-on-one lessons to grabbing the victim’s buttocks and threatening her in a quiet voice: “if you ever tell anyone, I will make your life hell.”
He was convicted by a jury of all charges in June 2024.
The Service Dog Problem
Before trial began, both sides learned the victim had a service dog with her at the courthouse. Defense counsel flagged the obvious concern: jurors might see the dog, connect it to the victim, and infer that she was suffering from emotional trauma as a result of what Roberts had done to her. That kind of inference, counsel argued, could generate unwarranted sympathy and taint the verdict.
To their credit, both sides worked out a practical solution. The Commonwealth placed the terms on the record: the dog would stay out of the courtroom when the victim testified; when in the courtroom, the dog would remain with the victim’s mother at all times; and the mother and daughter would be seated in a low-visibility area, away from the jury’s sightline, entering before jurors were brought in. The whole idea was deliberate ambiguity — if jurors happened to notice a dog, they’d have no reason to assume it belonged to the victim rather than to her mother.
Inside the courtroom, everything went according to plan.
What Happened at Lunch
On the day of the verdict, something went sideways. As several jurors were exiting the courthouse for a lunch break, the victim also walked out. She was holding the dog’s leash herself. A local reporter happened to be leaving at the same time. He watched as the victim walked through a narrow rope-line exit with a juror directly behind her. He later testified that it was “hard not to see her and the service dog.” He identified at least two empaneled jurors in the area.
Lewis wrote about it in an article published the same day, headlined “Despite efforts to keep from view, jurors in ex-band director’s trial see service dog.” Roberts’ counsel attached that article to a post-trial motion seeking a new trial.
The Legal Standard
When a defendant claims that something a juror saw or learned outside the trial tainted the verdict, Pennsylvania courts analyze it as an “extraneous influence” claim. The governing framework comes from Carter v. U.S. Steel Corp., 604 A.2d 1010 (Pa. 1992), and was reaffirmed in Pratt v. St. Christopher’s Hospital, 866 A.2d 313 (Pa. 2005).
The test is objective, not subjective. That’s important. Courts cannot ask the actual jurors whether the outside information affected their thinking — Pennsylvania Rule of Evidence 606(b) prohibits jurors from testifying about their own deliberative processes. So instead, the trial court asks how a hypothetical objective, typical juror would have been affected.
To win a new trial, the defendant must show a reasonable likelihood of prejudice. Courts weigh three factors: (1) whether the extraneous influence related to a central issue or merely a side issue; (2) whether it gave jurors information they didn’t already have from the evidence; and (3) whether it was emotional or inflammatory in nature.
Why Roberts Lost
The trial court held a full evidentiary hearing, heard Lewis testify, and reviewed the security footage. Its conclusion: the jurors’ view of the dog was “incidental and fleeting,” and the victim’s mother was present nearby — close enough that the designed ambiguity about whose dog it was remained essentially intact.
The Superior Court agreed and found no abuse of discretion. The brief exposure at a courthouse exit, with the mother present, didn’t clear the reasonable-likelihood-of-prejudice bar. Whatever the jurors may or may not have noticed on their way out the door, there was no basis to conclude that a typical juror would have drawn the specific prejudicial inference Roberts claimed — that the dog’s presence with the victim, in that moment, confirmed she was suffering ongoing trauma from his assaults.
The conviction stands.