[no run today]<\/p>\n
My summons said to show up on Tuesday morning so I shaved and put on better-than-average clothes and went down to the courthouse.<\/p>\n
There we were seated in pews in a large courtroom and given a sheet to fill out stating name, address, age, occupation, etc.\u00a0 We also got a small slip of paper with a note on it directing us to call a phone number after 5 pm every day this week for notification about whether we would need to come in on the next day.\u00a0 That was my first intimation that the service was for multiple days.<\/p>\n
Eventually a judge came in and he talked about the process they would follow.\u00a0 He explained the ways you could be excused from jury duty.\u00a0 Then he asked for people with excuses to come up to the front where they were sworn in and he heard their excuses.\u00a0 Most people stated what their issue was at the podium but some wanted to speak more privately to the judge.\u00a0 I remember some child-care issues, some financial hardship cases and some doctor\/specialist appointments.\u00a0 I think he let most of the people go but he refused a few and he gave a one-day excuse to a few.\u00a0 Then he went through some more potential excuse issues: illiterate, known gambler\/drunk, some others. And there were a few people that were excused on those grounds.<\/p>\n
I think we may have had a break or two during this activity.\u00a0 They picked 20 people to go off and be the Grand Jury.\u00a0 They gave the rest of us numbered paddles and from then on we sat in numerical order when in the big pool.<\/p>\n
After lunch they started the selection for the first trial.\u00a0 They gave some general information about the case, who the attorneys were, who the victim and defendant were, that kind of thing.\u00a0 And then asked a lot of general “raise\u00a0 your hand if you know Mr. Smith the shopkeeper at ABC store, a potential witness in this case” kind of thing.\u00a0 And people would say how they knew Mr Smith and whether that would keep them from being fair.\u00a0 The prosecutor asked some questions about whether anyone objected to the police or had philosophical reasons they couldn’t be fair or didn’t want to participate.\u00a0 (It turned out they gave a lot of opportunity to basically say “I don’t want to do this”).\u00a0 The defense attorney also had a go at the questions.<\/p>\n
Then they gave us another break while both sides worked up their acceptable jury list.\u00a0 When we came back in there was more hushed meeting between the lawyers and the judge. Eventually they called off 13 names starting with the low numbered people.\u00a0 I was number 30 and I was the 13th person selected. (so yes, they skipped a lot of people).\u00a0 That made me the alternate.\u00a0 Everyone else still in the big pool left.\u00a0 And they swore us in as the jury and we heard short opening statements from both lawyers.\u00a0 And then it was time to go home.<\/p>\n
The next day we went to a smaller court room because they needed the big room to convene the remaining pool to select another jury.<\/p>\n
We sat in the jury room.\u00a0 They called one of the 12 in to the courtroom.\u00a0 When he came back he said someone had noticed he greeted another person in the courthouse.\u00a0 It turned out that person was a relative of the defendant.\u00a0 So they called him back in to the courtroom again and we didn’t see him any longer on that case.\u00a0 They promoted me from alternate to regular juror.<\/p>\n
We spent the morning going between jury room and courtroom as they presented various witnesses about the event in question.\u00a0 Most of it was completely agreed on between both sides.\u00a0 But the defendant claimed self-defense.\u00a0 Everyone else said the defendant was the instigator, but he said he acted because the other guy was sneaking up on him.\u00a0 Yes, he testified.\u00a0 He was interesting, but he didn’t really do his case any good. At the end he yelled he was being tortured in the county jail and wouldn’t calm back down until the judge had him marched out.<\/p>\n
Another interesting thing was that the victim was not cooperative.\u00a0 He didn’t want to be there and he made that plain.\u00a0 But they eventually marched him through the statement he had given to police at the time and he didn’t contradict it on any points.\u00a0 In the altercation the defendant had a knife and the victim was stabbed in a couple of places but he took the knife away and knocked out the defendant.\u00a0 So I suspect the victim probably considered the issue moot.\u00a0 And all of this had happened 6+ years ago, so there was an unexplained time gap which the lawyers and judge just ignored.<\/p>\n
So we had the victim, the shopkeeper who had seen some of the event, and the defendant.\u00a0 Then we had the doctor where both men were taken to the ER and the police who secured the evidence and took pictures.\u00a0 The shopkeeper was very sure of his story.\u00a0 The uncooperative victim gave a similar story and the defendant who actually also gave a mostly similar story with a few parts different or missing and an incomplete plea to self defense. (He never said he was scared of the victim, or afraid for his life or anything else that would seem to be most obvious clues to self defense.\u00a0 And we of course had to rely on his lawyer to elicit that kind of information from him.\u00a0 But it didn’t happen.)<\/p>\n
At the end we had three empty witnesses called by the defence who basically said ‘I don’t know anything about this event’.<\/p>\n
Then we had summary statements by the prosecution, the defence and again the prosecution.\u00a0 After a break in the jury room, we listened to the judge read his jury instructions and the form of the verdict he wanted\u00a0 (the wording of either the not guilty or the guilty, I guess so that we didn’t go off and write our own maybe-so\/maybe-not response)\u00a0 And we went back into the jury room.\u00a0 We looked at the knife, which still had blood on it and we looked at the crime scene pictures and the wound pictures (nothing too gruesome).\u00a0 And we had the written copy of the jury instructions.<\/p>\n
We talked things over for ten or fifteen minutes I think.\u00a0 Then I asked the guy next to me if he believed the self-defense argument.\u00a0 And he said no.\u00a0 I said I didn’t either.\u00a0 We went around the table and everyone said they didn’t believe the self-defense argument.\u00a0 So we talked some more, wanted to make sure everyone was in agreement.\u00a0 And the person who had the pad of paper and the lady sitting next to her wrote down the ‘he’s guilty’ statement on the pad.\u00a0 And we knocked on the door and said we were done.<\/p>\n
We had grabbed up our stuff and were ready to roll out of there.\u00a0 But they delayed us a bit (probably to get the lawyers back and get the defendant back in attendance).\u00a0 Eventually we went back in and the lady handed the paper to the court official.\u00a0 He read it out loud.\u00a0 Then the judge asked each of us if we agreed with the verdict and we all said ‘yes’.<\/p>\n
None of this was done light heartedly.\u00a0 I wish the guy had a good excuse for his actions.\u00a0 But he didn’t.\u00a0 Or if he did, his lawyer never got him to say it or even get close to\u00a0 it. Even so, I was saddened to have to publicly state the guy was guilty.\u00a0 But it was the only conclusion.\u00a0 And it is up to the judge to form the sentence and probation and any other potentially merciful aspects.\u00a0 We weren’t around after we said our bit.<\/p>\n
There was a lot of “theatre” feeling to the whole thing. I am 100% sure there were facts known to the judge\/lawyers\/defendant, even the few spectators, which were not given to us.\u00a0 The three empty witnesses had me think that the defence lawyer was following the instructions of the defendant even to the point of being ridiculous.\u00a0 So the guy got his day in court.\u00a0 A bunch of people missed a day of work and the county and the lawyers did all their stuff for what was not really much of a case.\u00a0 But that’s what the system is about.\u00a0 If you demand to be heard then you are heard.<\/p>\n
The guy had a bit of a paranoia feel to him.\u00a0 He was pointing to documents and giving instructions to his lawyer and doing things in an unusual way.\u00a0 But, again we didn’t get any evidence about him being a mental case or anything like that.\u00a0 And maybe he was just a con-man in over his head.\u00a0 (It’s kind of a catch-22:\u00a0 if the guy is paranoid in a mental health sense, he probably wouldn’t trust his lawyer to get him the proper outcome, so he says he is not a psych case and it spirals down from there.)<\/p>\n
After I had gotten home I googled up his case online.\u00a0 There wasn’t much in the newspaper about it other than that he was arrested.\u00a0 He had also been arrested a few other times in 2011 for various offences which we didn’t know about during the trial.\u00a0 The next day there was a short article in the newspaper that he had been convicted.<\/p>\n
That evening I called the phone number and they wanted everyone to report back in the morning.\u00a0 They started a new trial and we went through the initial do-you-know-this\/or\/that-person\u00a0 questions.\u00a0 Eventually they picked a jury and I wasn’t on it and they sent me home.\u00a0 Thursday night I called again and they said I didn’t have to go in today.\u00a0 So I’m done.<\/p>\n
One other thought.\u00a0 A lot of what the judge said to us was very repetitive.\u00a0 So being a judge turns out to be a lot of exercise in managing a crowd of people.\u00a0 He had to teach us what we were doing as we did it.\u00a0 That’s the part of it we saw anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[no run today] My summons said to show up on Tuesday morning so I shaved and put on better-than-average clothes and went down to the courthouse. There we were seated in pews in a large courtroom and given a sheet to fill out stating name, address, age, occupation, etc.\u00a0 We also got a small slip […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mississippi","category-other-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6399"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6407,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6399\/revisions\/6407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}