I had jury duty last week, and got assigned to the trial of a man charged with first degree burglary. The trial lasted a day and a half, and we deliberated for a day and a half. We couldn't come to a unanimous agreement. Nine said "Guilty" [including me], and three said "Not guilty" [including three idiots].
In a nutshell, the defendant was caught red-handed coming out of a yard carrying items from inside the house in his hands. He bolted, and was later caught by the police, and positively identified by the victim. The front door was locked, and an upstairs window was open, accessible from the landing. But there were no fingerprints on the window or ledge, and no footprints left in the construction dust in the house.
The prosecution had to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that this guy was the one who entered the house and took the victim's stuff [watches, cash, jewelry]. Three jurors believed that someone else could have entered the house and taken things, then left the bag full of jewelry in the yard, where the defendant then saw it as he leisuely strolled by [forget that he didn't live in the neighborhood] and decided to take it. One juror, an old geezer with absolutely no common sense, even suggested that the victim was lying about all the missing items, and that one of the sub-contractors working on his house had actually cased the joint, left the stuff for the defendant to pick up, and gotten away before the victim saw him.
Um, yeah. Right. And maybe aliens from the planet Zoltron were beaming the bag of jewelry up to their spaceship when they were called back to the mother planet, so the bag fell in the yard, and blah blah blah.
What is so upsetting about this is that you hear a lot about the criminal justice system, how it's overstretched, and broken, and puts innocent people behind bars, and is too slow, etc. But everyone I came in contact with – the assistant D.A., the public defender, the bailiffs, the clerk, and the judge were professional, friendly, respectful, and just plain good people doing their job to the best of their ability.
Everyone, that is, except for those three jurors. The judge's instructions to the jury said that we were to weigh only the evidence that was entered into the court record, and that we were not to play the "What if?" game. Something I reminded that old man about, every time he opened his mouth and said "Maybe a sub-contractor was the accomplice."
The instructions further said that we were obligated to accept conclusions that were reasonable, and reject conclusions that were unreasonable. Something this old man was incapable of doing. There were several other indisputable facts those three jurors chose to ignore, not the least of which is that in 67% of cases, no usable fingerprints are ever recovered. [I gotta tell you too, that I open and shut my windows all the time to let the breeze in. I have never used my fingertips to do it.]
So, we ended in a hung jury and the judge declared a mistrial. The ex-con defendant was sent back to prison and the jury was sent home. I suppose they'll try him again. I hope the next jury can do a better job. But the next time you hear someone complaining about how broken our system is, and how nobody in the courts knows what they're doing, or lawyers are bad, or whatever -- tell them this story. Because it's not always the professionals who mess up. Sometimes it's the people that the system was designed to serve. Sometimes it's your neighbor – the old guy with the vacant smile that reflects the state of his brain.
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