A Juror and a Christian, Part 4

I felt twinges of nervous excitement and anxiety when I got the courthouse on Thursday morning.  In all honesty, I was mostly worried about being selected as an alternate juror.  After having sat through three days of the trial, I didn't want to have to wait in a room while everyone else deliberated!  That would have been a pretty big let-down after having invested so much already.  But I wasn't selected as an alternate, nor was I appointed the jury foreman; so we all went into the jury room at about 10am.

The deliberation was nothing like what I had expected it to me.  There was very little organized discussion.  Instead, there was generally multiple conversations going on at once, often alternating between expressions of emotions and rational thought and interspersed with, "Are they bringing us coffee?"  (which they did!)  I was really surprised by the amount of frustration in the room, but now that I reflect on it, I suppose it was very natural.  We had been there for over three days already, we had listened to intense testimony, we had precious little evidence on which to decide the verdict, and there were twelve people who all had to agree by the end.

I honestly believed the defendant was guilty.  We hadn't deliberated very long at all before it became obvious that everyone in the room truly believed that he was guilty.  However, the only direct we evidence we had for his guilt was the testimony of one material witness, and that testimony was not "water-proof," so to speak.  However, all the circumstantial evidence led to the conclusion that the material witness was telling the truth.  So essentially, in my mind at least, the main question was whether the testimony of the material witness combined with the circumstantial evidence defeated all reasonable doubts.  The gentleman who sat next to me on my right was vocal from the outset that he didn't believe there was enough evidence to convict the defendant.  However, not all were convinced.

We decided to start discussing the sixth charge, since that seemed the easiest of all.  Within five minutes everyone was ready to return a guilty verdict except for me.  This was the charge of the threatening phone call to intimidate the witness.  In order to convict the defendant of this charge, the law clearly stated that the prosecutor had to prove that that the defendant intended to interfere with the witness' testimony.  I wasn't convinced that the motive had indeed been proven from the evidence.  We hashed it out for several more minutes, and I asked for some more time to think about it.  So decided to come back to it later.

We moved on to the incident itself and talked ourselves in circles for over two hours.  No one raised their voices during this time, but frustration clearly filled the room.  In retrospect, I don't think we were really deliberating the case.  Rather, I think we were simply externalizing the tension we all felt: all of us truly believed the defendant was guilty, but none of us were sure.  It was like it just took us all several hours to resign ourselves to the fact that, according to the law, we had to return a Not Guilty verdict.  

Finally, someone suggested that we listen to the recording of the 9-1-1 call.  We probably spent over an hour listening to that call and talking about it.  The call itself was about 5 minutes long, and I think we played it back at least 4 times.  We continued to banter back and forth until the guy sitting across the table from me said, "Whoa!  Listen ... she [the material witness] says, 'I didn't see it.'"  The discussion between the 9-1-1 operator and the material witness was confusing, but it seemed clear that the phone conversation was taking place as they victims were being chased then as they were attacked.  There was a lot of crying and hysteria on the recording, as well as a lot of Spanish being spoken in the background.  At one point, the material witness cries out, saying, "I think someone's been shot!" (although this wasn't the case - the victim had just been hit in the head and fell to the ground)  Some frantic conversation ensued as the 9-1-1 was trying to ascertain the condition of the victim.  At one point he asked, "How did he get hit?"  The material witness then replied, "I don't know, I didn't see it."  After this, the deliberation come to a quick conclusion.  While tape certainly didn't disprove the testimony of the material witness, it did call into question what exactly she saw and what she didn't.  And because we couldn't be certain that the defendant was even there, none of the first five charges could be proven.

We ate lunch and then returned to the discussion of the phone call.  After a little more discussion, I agreed to return a Guilty verdict for that charge.  While the intent of the phone hadn't been absolutely proven, the circumstantial evidence left no other intent reasonably plausible.  I had doubt, but I didn't have a substantive reason to doubt.  Therefore, we voted Guilty for the sixth charge.  The rest was quite anti-climactic, actually.  We went down to the courtroom, the foreman read the verdict, the judge made some comments, and we were dismissed from the courtroom.  We never did hear the sentencing.

After we were dismissed, the judge came up to the jury room and talked to us for about 15 minutes or so.  He talked to us a little about the trial, saying that he thought the case was tried pretty well.  One of the guys talked about how he wished the verdict had gone the other way.  The judge replied, "Ah, but that's the beauty of our justice system.  The evidence just wasn't there."  The judge told us that just about everybody involved were illegal immigrants which made everything much more difficult.  But then after that, he admitted to us that two of the other three assailants had already pled guilty to the crime!  This information was gut-wrenching.  As of that time, the leader of the perpetrators had not been arrested because he was on the run.  My assumption is that he has returned to Honduras.

I know at least three of us jurors left with knots in our stomach.  The whole situation was awful.  Only God knows for certain, obviously, but a guilty man had been acquitted.  Why?  Because the law forbade it.  The requirements of conviction had not been met.  But was justice done?  This was the question with which I now wrestled; and the answer was an emphatic, "NO!"  So now what?