Dem
51
GOP
49
Time for another group of reader accounts of jury service. The theme today is that jurors pay close attention to behavioral cues, big and small.
S.C-M. in Scottsale, AZ, writes: I served on a jury in a civil liability case years ago. The case involved a child that was scalded at a daycare center because the water heater temperature was set too high. The child got scalded and the parents sued the daycare center for damages.
I ended up as the foreperson of the jury. The most interesting part was almost all the facts of the case were undisputed. The child was scalded, the water heater temperature was set too high. There were some medical costs involved. What kind of sealed the deal for the jury was that the parents, after picking up their injured son, dropped him off at his grandparents and spent a weekend at a resort.
The jury was ready to vote for no damages to the parents. However, I ended up convincing them the daycare center was negligent, but not grossly negligent. We finally decided that the center would pay the medical bills for the child and some small amount of punitive damages. I recall the whole amount was about $10K.
In a small way, because of the actions of the parents after the injury, the jury was ready to basically ignore the judge's directions on what negligence and gross negligence were in the law.
After the verdict, the judge told us the parents left over $100,000 on the table. That was the amount the insurance company of the daycare center was willing to pay to settle. The parents refused the settlement and were asking for over $600,000 in damages.
My takeaway was seemingly small events like the parents leaving their child for the weekend, which legally bore no relationship to any legal claim of negligence, can impact a jury in significant ways.
This could happen in Trump's trial, particularly if he insists on being a witness and he says or does something outrageous that irritates the jury.
T.S. in Mansfield, OH, writes: Veteran of two civil trial juries in Ohio. The conduct of the defendant or plaintiff during the trial, especially if called to testify, is important. Evasiveness or incomplete answers tend to reflect negatively in this juror's mind. Similarly, the conduct of the legal team. In one case, the plaintiff's legal team did not take the time to explore their client's medical expenses. They just handed over to the jury a stack of billing documents as Exhibit X. (If the plaintiff's attorneys can't be bothered to go through at least some of them, why would they expect the jury to?) In another trial, the plaintiff's attorney attempted to impeach the credibility of the defense's expert witness. On redirect it was revealed that the expert witness had testified in other cases on plaintiff's attorney's behalf. (Oops! Your credibility just went into self-destruct mode).
D.R. in Charlotte, NC, writes: I was a juror in a sexual assault trial 20 years ago. It was somewhat similar to the recent Trump vs E. Jean Carroll trial, as the purported assault was years in the past and it was he-said-she-said. My jury found the defendant not guilty because there was no physical evidence, though to this day I do not know if it was the correct verdict.
The most important lesson is the members of the jury are the most important people in the courtroom, followed by the judge. Not the defendant or the lawyers. Donald Trump, in the E. Jean Carroll trial, was oblivious to this concept. He was flying off to Scotland and doing Trumpy things to be the center of attention. This appeared to annoy the judge and jurors can pick up on that.
Starting with the indictment in Florida, the most important people in Trump's life will be twelve future jurors. I doubt he will ever understand that and I see him losing every jury trial that comes his way.
J.T. in Greensboro, NC, writes: I served on a criminal jury a few years ago and the experience was eye-opening, though what it tells me about the Trump case is trickier.
If I recall correctly, the jury consisted of 9 people including myself. The case involved resisting arrest, assault of a police officer, and something related to "attempting to induce another party to interfere with an arrest in progress." The first charge was a gross misdemeanor while the other two were felonies.
Trying to keep the case as simple as possible: A police officer went to a middle-aged white woman's suburban home in an affluent suburb on a "civil assist" to resolve a dispute between her and a contractor. According to the charge, while in the home she hit the police officer and attempted to get her 18-year-old son to attack the police officer. The conflict moved outside the house, where the neighbors watched her resist while the officer handcuffed her and put her in the squad car.
Understand that I'm pretty pro-defendant as a default position, and I'm skeptical of the state as a default position. Even (especially?) as a pretty left-wing person, I think a default skepticism of the exercise of state power is very healthy. I also used to work at a law firm that actually opposed the lawyer hired by the city on multiple misdemeanor cases. I said all this in selection (though I also mentioned I had a cousin who was a cop). I was positively shocked to be selected for this case.
At trial, to my mind, the defendant's lawyer did her no favors. He put her in cartoonishly giant sunglasses to emphasize an alleged concussion she received from the officer. She was in a comically large cast (though provided no medical evidence that she suffered any harm by the cop) and it was really kind of a bad comedy designed to engender sympathy from the jury and it completely backfired. The jury, myself included, found her and her lawyer insufferable.
However, what was more important to me is that the city provided absolutely zero evidence, other than the officer's word, that she either struck the officer at any time, or that she attempted to get her son to help her. No body-cam, no recording, no independent witnesses, no medical evidence, nothing.
When we entered deliberations the foreman was revealed to be the "alternate" and was removed from the pool, and I—being the alternate foreman—became the foreman. I first asked people to write down their verdicts anonymously on the charge of resisting, the one the city actually proved well. People put their verdicts in a hat and I read them. We returned a unanimous guilty verdict on resisting.
Where things became more complicated were on the other two charges. The other two charges came back something like 7-2 or 6-3 "guilty" even though the city, beyond the officer's word, had not provided a scintilla of evidence that she'd ever struck the officer or tried to involve her son, much less proved it beyond a reasonable doubt.
The reasons my fellow jurors gave were along the lines of "I just didn't like her" and "she seemed crazy to me" and "she seems like she loves drama" etc., etc. I basically played "12 Angry Men" and spent the afternoon convincing 6 or 7 of my peers that you can't just send a woman to a rather substantial jail sentence because you find her "unlikeable" and think she "seemed crazy." After a lunch of fried chicken from a local grocery store, I managed to convince them and we the jury found her not guilty of the two felony offenses and guilty of the misdemeanor offense that the city actually proved.
I don't like to make sweeping generalizations but for me, the experience told me that I absolutely never want a jury trial, because juries, it turns out, don't care much about evidence, and seem to care much more about theatrics and their trust in state authorities and institutions. Ultimately a woman stayed out of jail because a recalcitrantly evidence-focused person happened to be on the jury that day.
It's hard for me to say what the experience tells us about Trump, but I'm somewhat inclined to think it bodes poorly for him because he seems like a terribly unlikeable person who is prone to precisely the type of vaudeville antics the defendant resorted to in the case I was a juror on. I think the jurors felt on some level insulted by just how goofy the defense presentation was and this inclined the jurors to convict the defendant even though the city's case was incredibly weak. This is perhaps supported by the verdict in the E. Jean Carroll case, where the standard of evidence was different since it was a civil case and even a two-time Trump voter was able to believe based mostly on the complainant's word that he assaulted her.
On the other hand, my experience as a criminal juror also tells me that jurors—like many Americans—don't care much about the presence or absence of evidence and so all the photos and recordings and smoking guns the Feds have come up with probably won't matter a hill of beans. Consider, for example, the case of Rodney King, where an extensive and detailed video that the public found incredibly damning failed to satisfy the jury that the police had acted improperly.
My personal experience on a jury tells me that juries tend to care more about their gut feelings stirred up with their own preconceived notions than they do about evidence.
A.H. in Newberg, OR, writes: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... Oops, wrong story. Back to reality!
A decade back in a previous life, I had the privilege to serve on a jury and was actually elected foreman by the other members.
It was the local county circuit court. It was scheduled for the morning, starting at +/- 9am. I think there were probably 30 or 40 potential jurors. Juror questioning took about an hour to get down to the final 12. It was a relatively simple set of allegations: trespassing, possession of an unregistered firearm, and driving under the influence.
The person's whole problem was that he was: (1) a veteran, (2) homeless [camping on some farmer's woodlot], (3) overindulgent in mind-altering chemicals, and (4) a "sovereign citizen."
I have heard some strange arguments from the cult of true believers of the Mar-A-Loco malefactor, but none that would hold a candle to some of the s**t that this person spouted. After the prosecutor laid out their case, and the defendant did his dog and pony show (something about whether or not there was fringe on the U.S. flag and that the government was actually being run by a cabal of European bankers), we retired to the jury room. The biggest holdup in deliberation was the line for the sole restroom, and the question of whether we should delay and get a free lunch delivered. We decided to skip the lunch. We were out by 11:30 and another one bites the dust.
Another group on Friday! (Z)