Dateline 5-2-2017

Damn it, I was fully expecting to be well rested today but due to a combination of staying up late to celebrate the end of my run of jury duty and the fact that I now wake up at the same time every morning no matter when I fall asleep, I had to Frankenstein my morning just to fit in four and a half hours of sleep after first waking with only two hours under my belt.

I have breakfast cooking so hopefully, we'll both notice a change in energy as I continue to write through my waking process. This should be the case as I'm already noticing that my mind's more alert just by priming my thoughts with that opening paragraph.

Alright, now that I'm fed, it's time to tell my Tales From The Courthouse following the first time I was ever selected to be on a jury. First off, if you're interested in my Tales Of Jury Selection, you can start by reading that here. If not, then just continue reading but that's totally up to you.

As a reminder, we were the second group of potential jurors to be called up to be questioned so day one started early, making it a full day and a half of jury selection. The link above talks about the non-case related observations that I thought were safe enough to share. Other than that, the incident took place in prison so a bulk of the questioning was about hearing evidence from police without any bias.

Between the fact I was looking at an African American inmate sitting at the defense table and this line of questioning, I thought for sure this was a case of an altercation between said inmate and possibly a prison guard. Where they seemed to be focused on people who might give officer's testimony more weight due to a respect for authority, I started to question myself as to whether or not I would hold this position of power against them. 

Either way, I thought I would be good for this case because I thought I could be fair and really committed to the whole innocent until proven guilty thing and tend to lean toward the side of a citizen until I see the evidence that I need. 

They picked the jury and sent us off to lunch and were promised the opening arguments upon our return and that's when the shit show began. Keep in mind, though I'm about to share a lot of issues that I had, I wouldn't say that anything was out of the ordinary, inappropriate or unfair. No, any complaints that you read are purely about my issues with the system.

My first problem was how we all came back from lunch on time or early, yet had to wait another hour and a half out in the hall. It took so long we thought that they might be settling out of court but it turned out this was just par for the course.

Every day, we would all show up when told only to have to wait at least an hour before they got the show on the road. Then they would do something for an hour before sending us out of the room and then it would take another forty-five to get everything going just to take another break.

It turned out that this first delay had to do with a scheduling conflict where they had to rearrange something in order to fit everything in for that day. We eventually got let in and had our seat to get the opening arguments. This is when I found out that this was a case where one inmate assaulted another and it was all caught on videotape. 

Apparently, in prison, the race-based gangs have to work it out amongst themselves to see who will have the honored duty of handing out the meals which gives the winning race have all the rights to anything that might be extra.

On the day in question, there was a bit of a debate because the "blacks" have been in charge all week. Though the two factions in question managed to work everything out and seemed completely fine, there was one Hispanic inmate that just wasn't having so he started to talk some shit. Little did he know, our defendant was on the approach and he sucker punched our victim right out of his shoes.

This was the very first thing we saw and it was extremely hard not to determine my verdict almost immediately. Then again, I figure with such clear-cut evidence, I figure this would be a pretty interesting case so I was still up to give the defendant a shot but this was a pretty big point against him.

The defense then pled their case which didn't do much to dig this guy out of the deficit that was building in my head. I was hoping maybe this was going to be a case of mistaken identity because I didn't see any evidence of self-defense which seemed to be their main argument.

Unfortunately, we never got any evidence toward mistaken identity. In fact, even the defendant agrees that it is clearly him in the video and he did make the hit and that they fully tend to prove that this is a matter of self-defense which led me to be real interested in seeing how they would pull this off and why they were expecting it to take a week to do so.

We then heard evidence from a doctor that pretty much just confirmed that our victim's lower jaw was broken in two places to the point where there was a giant loose piece floating around in his head which required them to wire his mouth shut to fix it. In order to throw in a hint of reasonable doubt, the defense brought up an auto accident that happened two years prior as if we were supposed to believe that these were preexisting injuries that this guy was able to live with.

This led to the end of day two and once again we were released later than any other jury to the point where I almost missed last call at Jury Service and barely got my bus pass on time. Fortunately, we were informed of more scheduling conflicts which meant we'd be starting the next day late and was didn't have to be there until ten. This was great news to me because it meant that I could get caught up on my sleep.

By day three, I was into the routine and the late start made it more tolerable of a day. Once again, we all arrive on time, having given the people in charge of the schedule that extra hour they needed, yet we still had to sit out in the hall for an hour before we were let in to get back to the juroring.

Our victim was then brought into the courtroom. He was currently serving time so he was shackled and in his county blues and not all that willing to participate. He denied everything and took the blame but it was obvious that he was doing so in order to stick to the code of the street. 

It got a little fun here because the prosecutor's case was that he was accepting the blame because he was still in prison and afraid to be seen as a snitch. This led the two well off attorneys to have to keep asking, "And what happens to snitches," to ever witness throughout the rest of the case. This actually drove me nuts because I was expecting at least one of the prisoners to answer with, "They get stitches," but instead they stuck to technical terms like, "They get beat up."

There was a little while where the victim's testimony made me want to argue more for innocent but this would have been more of a political statement than actually following the law. For one, I figured as sad as it is there are plenty of incidents where the obvious victim are allowed to drop the case out of fear. This evidence got me thinking, hell, if the prison system allows these prisoners to make their own rules, why not respect those rules because according to both people involved, everything was supposed to have already been worked out.

We got out early this day because they didn't want to start with the next witness only to have the evidence split between two days. It was at this point that I started to get real annoyed with the case and the system. Between the witnesses mention above and maybe one or two more, there was zero evidence that the defendant or anyone else was ever in enough emanate danger to consider this to be an act of self-defense.

I get it. The ability to defend yourself in court is very important and I'm by no means say that this case wasn't worth the effort. There was a man's freedom involved here which is very important to me but again, this case seemed so cut and dry that there was no way that it justified an entire week which may sound rough but that's just how damning this video was.

As I said, in the video we see a bunch of people talking, there's no audio and minus the witness evidence you can hardly tell that the argument is getting all that heated. In fact, everyone has their hands at their side without a hint of aggressive posturing. Our victim seems so unprepared for a fight which is why I think the punch did extra damage and caused the victim to fall out of his shoes before landing hard on the floor.

I feel that is he was really about to attack the third, unheard from, inmate, who our defendant was claiming as his in defense of other reason for the attack, he would have been bracing himself for this main confrontation to where he wouldn't flail so much as the punch sent him across the room. 

Once again, we started late on Friday with promises that we should get to the end and as always there were tons of delays that pushed closing arguments to Monday. I know, I know, we talking about a man's freedom here but he's still locked up for a different case and this layover totally ruined my weekend.

Monday came and as always, we started an hour late. Which pushed closing arguments right up to lunch which added another hour and a half to the day. We did manage to get fifteen minutes of deliberation in before lunch and we all seemed to be on the same page but everyone was pussyfooting around committing to this as their final answer.

Said fifteen minutes passed and we were released for lunch which sucks because we had just gotten past testing the waters to where everyone was expressing their thoughts and not just questioning what we do now. By the time we got back from lunch, it took us about a half hour to commit to the verdict but we spent most of that time sharing things that we found strange about the case in general since the key factor, in this case, was whether or not this was self-defense and we determined very early in our discussion that it was not. 

Once we handed in the verdict we had to wait another half hour, this is when the two old ladies started to have a confusion off trying to put themselves in a situation where they would punch someone over lunch. One old lady didn't know what tweaking was since the victim claimed he was high, and old guy then chime in that he thought the guy was going to shake his butt because he thought the victim said he was "quirking" to which the other old lady said she thought it had something to do with Twitter.

This after verdict conversation left me questioning how the hell these people could be considered the defendant's peers. Hell, I was almost twice the guy's age and I was one of the younger members of the bunch. If the evidence wasn't so obvious, I'd feel worse about this discrepancy in what I would consider a peer but, I was just doing my civic duty and stick by my vote so my conscious is pretty clear.

Wow, that ended up going much longer than I was expecting and may have been more technical that fun but now the whole thing is out of my system and it's time for me to move on.

Talk to you tomorrow,

The Wicker Breaker