The System
Laura's younger brother is cross-examined. Here we start to see disparity between Laura's story and that of her brother. She said that Chris had pulled in the driveway at just behind them, and had immediately gotten out, drawn a knife, and threatened to kill her. Laura's brother claims that Chris did not get into the driveway until they were nearly all the way in the front door of their house, and he claims not to know wether or not Chris ever got out of the car. He also never did see a knife or hear a threat. They agree that once in the house, Laura retrieves a pistol, and instructs her brother to get something for defense. He grabs a bat and returns to the living room. She says "No, go get the shotgun", which he does not do. She then claims to hear Chris coming up the steps to the house. Her brother never claims to have heard or seen this. She looks out the window in the front door, and sees Chris backing off of the porch to the front yard. She goes outside, gun at her side, instructing her brother to lock the door behind her. He says he does this, and then returns to the couch with the bat. Some short period of time later, a gunshot is heard. A short time after that, tires squeel in the driveway, as Chris leaves. She claims he was out of his car, with a knife (which she had supposedly seen on the way into the house before she got the gun). Her brother says that he never actually saw Chris out of his car. He claims to have sat on the couch through the whole event, and that he did not at any time look out of the window to see what was going on. After the shot is fired, Laura returns inside and calls 911. According to her, they instruct her to put the gun away. She claims that this is what she did, and that she did not touch it again until the police arrived. She claims that one shot was fired. Her brother, on the other hand, claims that she shot the gun twice. Once from the front porch, and once into the air in the back yard after she had called 911, because the hammer was cocked back, and she did not know of any other way to release the hammer without firing the weapon. He says that she then reloaded the weapon. She never mentioned any of this. The policeman who had arrived on the scene says that she claimed to have fired one shot, and that only one bullet in the gun had actually been fired when he examined it. Aside from Laura's brother's cross examination, we heard from 3 law enforcement agents that day. They corroborated that Laura had had ongoing problems with Chris, and that they believed her in claiming that he had been at her house on Aug 8, and that she had fired one round from her pistol. After all of this evidence, the judge restated the charge of aggravated assault. In order for us to find Chris guilty of this charge, we had to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he had, in fact, threatened her and that he had, in fact, been displaying a knife at the time of this threat. We were dismissed to deliberate.
The first thing we did was to take a secret vote of his innocense or guilt just to see where we stood. It was tied at 6 and 6. So we started talking. Immediately, we all agreed that Chris was guilty of a great many of things... but was he guilty of the specific charge they were accusing him of? Since Laura's brother was only able to corroborate that Chris had followed them to their house, and not that he got out of the car, or displayed a knife, or made a threat, then it all boiled down to one thing. Laura's credibility. She was the sole person making the claim. Could we believe her. Most of us wanted to. I actually do believe most of what she said. I was very dissappointed from the very beginning that I believed there to be a reasonable doubt in favor of Chris. We talked about it for some time, and took another secret vote, and it had turned 7-5 in favor of a not guilty verdict. We took an open vote on how many of us wanted to see Chris go to jail, and we all raised our hands. But if we followed the rules as they were explained to us, we could not vote on that line of reasoning. We had to vote based on wether or not it was reasonable to doubt that Chris had at that time displayed a knife as he had made the threat. Since Laura was the only one making this claim, we started talking more about her credibility. We did this by comparing her testimony to that of her brothers. Of course they had some minor disagreements, such as who got to the door of their house first, distance estimates and timing estimates, but we dismissed those differences as insignificant. We focused on what we percieved to be the material discrepencies. They did not agree on exactly where Chris had parked his car. This seemed only moderately important, but was more significant than some of the other factors we had dismissed. Next was the discrepency on when Chris had actually parked in their yard compared to them parking. She says it was simultaneous to when she pulled in, and he claims that they were out of their car and nearly in the house before Chris even pulled into their yard. And finally, the biggest discrepency was how many times the gun was fired. She claimed only one shot on her report the police that day, and in her testimony. She claimed that after having called 911, she put the gun in a drawer under the phone and did not touch it again until the police arrived. Her brother, in his statement to the police at the time, claimed only one shot. But in his testimony, he claimed two shots. To us, this indicated that either she, or he was not completely credible as a witness. We all seemed to think of him as the more credible of the two, so this discrepency really damaged her credibility to us all. We took another vote, open this time, and it was 8-4 in favor of not guilty. Some people still wanted to believe her. I challenged those who still were in favor of a guilty verdict to explain to me how it would be "unreasonable" for any of us to doubt her testimony in light of the discrepencies described above. This seemed to win a few more over. We were able to get to an 11-1 vote in favor of not guilty, and we talked with the last gentleman until he also agreed that a reasonable doubt existed. We sent a note to bailif Bailey that we had arrived at a verdict. Someone commented on the fact that we were about to have to walk in the room, looking both Chris and Laura in the eyes, while we rendered a verdict of not guilty. None of us wanted to. We felt that Chris was guilty of many things... just not the particular one he was being charged with at that moment. I hated to think of Laura's dissappointment with our verdict. I also hated to think of Chris sitting there feeling as though he had outwitted us.
I'd like to comment on the other jurors at this point. I was very pleased to be deliberating with the 11 other people I was with. Everyone was able to put their emotions aside and do the job we had to do according to the rules we were supposed to work within. If for any reason I am ever on trial, I hope I have a similar jury panel. We disagreed at the beginning, and calmly talked it out until we could all agree. Never was there a raised voice, or even a hint of rudeness. Everyone was respectful of the other persons, and above all, respectful of the seriousness of the situation.
So we enter the courtroom and render our verdict. Chris did not seem to gloat. No shouts of joy or high fives with his lawyer. He just kinda sat there. I was not sitting where I could see Laura or her brother, so I do not know what their reaction was. I'm glad I could not see.
As soon as we returned to the jury room from the court room, the bailiff told us "I don't mean to make you feel bad... but this guy is a bad guy. Last year he had a capital murder charge against him dismissed for lack of evidence. He's previously been charged with sexual assault, and is currently on probation." My stomach sank. Then the lawyers came by as well to comment to us. The prosecuters said that they knew we did what we had to do, and basically apologized for not having a better case against Chris. They left, and the defense attorney stepped in the room. He almost immediately apologized for the way things were, and was obviously also dissappointed to know that Chris was a free man. He told us that he was court appointed, and was glad not to have to see Chris again. I had a glimmer of understanding at that moment. Even though we all knew Chris was guilty of SOMETHING, we had to follow the rules of the court and return a verdict of not guilty becuase that's what the law, as explained to us, said to do. In the same way, the court appointed this man to defend Chris, which he did to the best of his ability. I don't know how I could do that... but I guess somebody has to. We told him that we all wanted to give a guilty verdict, and would have done so if we had been able. He told us that Chris had said that if he was not found guilty, he was going to join the military to remove himself from this area and from any temptation of hassling Laura any further. Then the defense attorney promised us two things. First, he promised that he would convey to Chris that we all wished to send him to jail... and that we had given him the not guilty verdict very grudgingly. And he also said that he would personally escort Chris to a recruiters office tomorrow during time he had already set aside for Chris's punishment phase of prosecution. He even said that any or all of us were welcome to call his office to know the outcome of that.
Final thoughts:
So I have to go to sleep tonight and be happy with myself. Did we do the right thing? I think we did. I don't feel good about it. I felt sick to my stomach when Bailif Bailey had told us what he knew of Chris. But even knowing that, I still have reasonable doubts about Laura's version of the story. I don't like that we were forced into the position of making that decision. I feel like the prosecutors should have went for a different charge, or have put their case together better. I would have found Laura more credible had her brother not testified. But because they chose the charge they chose, and because Laura's brother cast doubt on some of the things she had said, I personally felt that it was reasonable to doubt her story. I hope never to hear that anything has happened to her at the hand of Chris. I cannot tell you how horrible I would feel if that were to happen. If I read anything else about the two of them in the paper, I hope it is that she shot him for trespassing or breaking and entering. But, of course, my true preference would be that Chris gets his life straight somewhere other than East Texas, and that Laura is able to live in peace and never encounter this man again.
I also want to say at this point that I'm not upset with our system. I don't necesarily think it failed. We are human, and therefore we are going to make mistakes. In a court of law, only two outcomes exist for a mistake. Either a guilty person goes unpunished, or an innocent person does get punished. Of the two, I think that the former is the lesser of the two evils. In fact, I think the ultimate legal sin is to punish an innocent person. Therefore, our laws slant in favor of the person being accused. This increases the chance of a guy like me remaining free from undue punishment. If the cost for that freedom is that, on occasion, a criminal goes unpunished for one of his crimes... I think it's worth the price.