Thursday, August 16, 2012
Wasted Time
So jury duty is over. It all ended in a mistrial when one of the jury couldn't be convinced that there was not enough evidence to convict. We actually spent all day today trying to convince this one juror that there wasn't any evidence worthy of sending the 20 year girl defendant to prison for. The state just didn't have it all together. We failed as the woman was irrational and wanted a guilty verdict. It took the rest of us jurors about an hour to conclude that the evidence wasn't there and the rest of the day was spent on the one holdout. So anyway, from a justice perspective it was a wasted three days for me.
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2 comments:
Frustrating. I once spent three days in pretrial activities before a murder trial, which I knew I could not be chosen for. Another time I spent three days before I could tell the judge in a third-felony drug case that I could not "consider the full range of penalties under law" if we convicted. (Life in prison for a baggie? Get real!)
As little as Harris County, TX likes it, and as difficult as they make it for cripples to submit their disability, if you can't walk half a block, you can't serve on a jury here, because of the multiple courthouses served from the same jury assembly room through underground passages downtown. Getting out of jury duty now makes up for my having served twice as many times as everyone else most of my life: my driver's license and my voter registration differ in (middle name, middle initial), and the state computer can't handle the difference, so they summoned me as two different people, thus twice as often. It was decades before I ferreted out what was really happening. Even then I didn't fix it; I didn't want to risk either my right to vote or my right to drive.
One young woman will have the chance for a future because of you/ Good work.
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