So for the past week or so I have been deep in the bowels of the American justice system, serving as judge, jury, and executioner, or at least that middle one.

Now before I get into the case itself, here are three things of interest which happened in the courthouse

1. I hate, in all honesty, even to mention this, lest people begin to feel my journal comments on nothing but scatological humor. But it happened, and it must be reported! So, I walk into the downstairs bathroom in the courthouse. There is an elderly man, laying on the floor of the stall, with his pants, shoes, and underwear neatly piled beside him. The door is open, and he is spreading his own excrement all over everything within reach, and moaning.

I went outside, told the guard something terrible was happening in the restroom, and I went from that place, never to return again.

2. During court, a man came over the intercom and said "This is an emergency! Would floor 1, 1A, 2, 2A and the basement please evacuate the building immediately!" I, of course, was on floor 3. Apparently, floor 3 is on the "let the motherfuckers burn" list, or something.

3. Some dude walked into court with a gun, and nobody did anything. Well, the guard motioned for another guard to come over, but he did not, and the guy walked in packing his gun. Never got found.

Oh, and the other bathroom, the one I used for the rest of my jury-duty experience, had the best graffiti ever. Directly across from where you sit, scrawled in red pen, it said "DO YOU FEEL SAFE?"

And no, I did not.

<lj-cut text="As to the trial itself...">

So the case was pretty cut and dried in most ways.

AT point A, a fellow saw a couple kids acting weird, whispering and moving in bushes and such. He watched them for a while, thinking they might try to break into his car. He saw them try the handle of a car near his apartment, then one ( a young hispanic fellow) crossed the street and got into a truck, fiddled inside it for a minute, then zoomed off at top speed down the road, without his friend. About 10 minutes later, he saw the two kids sitting at a shell station down the road, and he wandered down and ID'd the defendant as the guy who took the truck.

During those 10 minutes, the truck had traveled about two blocks south and east and crashed into a parked car. The lady who owned the car that got crashed into ran to her window and saw a hispanic fellow fall out of the car, and then book down the road with her neighbor right behind him. The neighbor who was chasing him said he never got a good look at the guy he was chasing, but that he thought it was a black male. They ran past a third guy who was watching out his window, who said that the guy being chased was a young hispanic male - who he then positively ID'd about 30 minutes later as the defendant.

Between the first ID and the second, they brought in a K-9 unit. He started out in the truck, sniffed around, jumped out, followed the track along the route the 3 point B witnesses had seen the suspect flee, turned up the road, and went to the shell station, sniffing the defendants backpack, then moving on and stopping outside the car the defendant was in. The dog went around to the side the defendant was on, ignoring his friend on the other side.

So that was pretty much the case. The defense attorney was great to watch working, all sly smiles and arched brows and finger-tents. He *looked* snug and manipulative, like a used car salesman, but somehow he still always sounded entirely reasonable, even when he was selling you total, verifiable nonsense. He talked a great show, brought in expert witnesses to talk theoretical problems. The prosecutor was young, less experienced, relying on brute facts.

The jury was mostly on the fence, sliding one way, then another, never solidifying. There were a few major players, though:

1. Shopping lady: shopping lady gained this name because she did not eat with us on lunch break, but went shopping. She came into the jury room 100% certain she could not vote guilty, because there was not enough physical evidence. She wanted hair samples, and fingerprints, and DNA evidence, and clothing fibers. The whole CSI kit.

2. Me: Me, I thought finding this chap guilty was like finding the nose on your face.

3. Jovial chap: laughed a lot, had a mustache and a bald head and talked about the Philippines (where his family is from) a lot. He was convinced the defendant was guilty, for the same reasons as me... we talked about the evidence taken as a whole, the way each piece backed up the other, how the one misplaced piece (one fellow thinking he was chasing a black man) was directly contradicted by two other witnesses who saw the same thing he did, a third witness who saw the defendant get into the car, and a dog track. Seemed enough to us.

4. Cool Seattle Liberal: older gentleman with a mustache and prominent nose who talked about books and architecture and good eats with me. We toured the local buildings together. He stayed on the not guilty side; in a singular way - he found the dog and the two witnesses at the bottom credible, but he did not like the first witness, so he said he could not find him guilty - he, along with several other people, seemed to take reasonable doubt as applying not to the case overall, but to each individual part. He had doubts about one guy, so not having doubts about the rest counted as innocent.

I disagreed, but hey. He was a good fellow. He gave the defense attorney (after the trial) an amusing lecture about how his client needs to make better life choices.

5. Alaskan Fisherman: contrary to all expectations of grizzled Alaskan fisherman, this was a diffident twenty something in glasses who never made up his mind one way or another, but was wracked with constant, vocal doubts which spooked the jury no end

Ultimately, the jury only agreed on one thing - the defendant was the guy who had stolen the car, crashed the car, and fled. The question became whether the state's case was good enough to call beyond reasonable doubt. Ultimately, it came down to an almost even split - 5 guilty, 2 undecided (one siding mostly guilty, one siding mostly not guilty), 5 not guilty. HUNG JURY! We all got to go home after 3 days of deliberation.

For the not guilty it basically came down to a few things -

1. A lack of the expected, CSI approved physical evidence. Shopping lady in particular maintained there was no evidence at all, and brandished the lack of clue-objects in the jury room like a club.

2. Individual doubts. For the most part, we agreed there were two points of view - the guilty voters looked at the case as a coherent whole that came together, and the not-guilty voters had problems with specific pieces. One felt the dog track was "anticlimactic", and that the dog should have barked and leapt at the car door rather than just stopping his track. One felt the first witness was too nervous on the stand, and would have been too nervous to get a good look at the suspect. One felt no one person had a good enough view. Doubts could be found in individual pieces, and whether or not this created an overall reasonable doubt was the subject of discussion.

3. Speculation. This was rife... the idea that we only pay attention to what was presented was thrown out the window early on. People made up elaborate stories about how a third man could have thrown off the dogs, asked whether the glass had shattered when the car crashed, and if so, was any glass in the defendants hair, and if so, why didn't they mention it to the jury? Shopping lady maintained no one could get out of a crashed car and run, three witnesses to the feat be damned. Did any of the keys on the keying found in the truck fit the defendants apartment? Maybe the dog just wanted to go to sleep in the back of the police car?

These sorts of doubts were a constant, spooking the jury and making for restlessness and not guilty voters.

4. The defense lawyer was slick, and managed to make a pretty strong feel of innocence entirely apart from the evidence... his wording was smart, his cross examinations nimble and clever. An instance - he asked the k-9 officer what a police dog is trained to do on an evidence search (the dog lays down next to the evidence). He then asked another witness if the dog had lain down next to the backpack (evidence!). The dog did not! Ah-ha!

Of course, had he mentioned this to the K-9 officer he would have told him (as I told the jury later) an evidence search is entirely different from a track - you don't lay down next to a dropped hanky and let the man get away while tracking. In a track, you follow the scent until it ends, or you make contact (bite.) A tracking dog wouldn't lie down next to the backpack, clever spin aside. But he created a very strong early feeling of innocence, even when I could see the game he was playing.



All in all, an interesting experience! I liked it. I probably could have brought the jury to my side if shopping lady hadn't been there, but she was never going to budge. An interesting look at the dynamics of juries and the such.

Also, I found a neat starbucks that I'm not telling you about.