August 18, 2010

Juries are unpredictable

No matter how hard the attorneys on either side try to divine it, putting twelve people together in a room and asking them to determine somebody's guilt or innocence is in some respects a crapshoot.

I say that not only because of the Blagojevich verdict and the news that on the charge that he attempted to sell Obama's old Senate seat there was one holdout who refused to vote guilty with her eleven colleagues, but from my experience as well.

About fifteen years ago I was on a state criminal court jury which was presented with pretty damning evidence that the night manager of a fast food joint had stolen the afternoon and evening's take. Procedure said he should bag up the cash and deposit it into the night deposit slot at a local bank branch. The camera that focused on that slot showed he'd never shown up to do so, and the cash never got into the company's bank account.

That seemed pretty obvious to eleven of us; we voted to convict. But one guy kept us in the jury room an extra day because he kept constructing outlandish scenarios which showed the guy was innocent. After a while it got really frustrating. All our arguments were based on the idea that we had to decide based on the evidence presented to us in the courtroom. Jurors are not allowed to make up fiction which overrides that evidence. We finally convinced him of that and he voted with us to convict.

Apparently one woman on the Blagojevich jury kept doing something similar. One of her fellow jurors, a Mr. Sarnello, said:

That one holdout -- a woman whom her colleagues declined to single out -- felt she had not gotten the "clear-cut evidence" she needed to convict, Sarnello said.

"Say it was a murder trial -- she wanted the video," Sarnello said. "She wanted to hear [Blagojevich] say, 'I'll give you this for that.' . . . For some people, it was clear. Some people heard that. But for some, it wasn't clear.''

In the words of pitcher Joaquin Andujar: "There is one word in America that says it all, and that one word is, 'You never know.' "

Posted by Linkmeister at August 18, 2010 11:28 AM | TrackBack
Comments

If there is one thing this blog (and the internet in general) needs more if it is the wit and wisdom of Joaquin Andujar!

Here's my jury story, second hand: The central witness in the prosecution's case is a police officer, who continuously refers to the accused as "the perpetrator." Then, in the jury room, the first thing one of the jurors asks is, "Who was this purple traitor they kept talking about?"

Posted by: bureaucratist at August 19, 2010 06:56 AM

During voir dire of a civil case (damages action in a slip and fall case), I was excused from the jury panel by the judge (so the excuse wouldn't count either side) because I said I had worked as a copyeditor for Matthew Bender on their trial and evidence books. (At the time I was working as a paralegal in utility regulatory law.) The idea was that I was likely to be able to influence the jury because I knew more than the average person about the rules of evidence and civil procedure in such cases. I didn't mind getting off that panel.

Posted by: PurpleGirl at August 24, 2010 10:06 AM