Scooter

MSNBC says a mistrial is inc;

The jury now, which is in its fourth day of deliberations, has a major problem which could put this entire case on the verge of a mistrial. The jury foreperson sent the Judge a note this morning, saying that one of the jurors in this panel had contact with news coverage of this case and used that information as part of the jury deliberations with others. In other words, this outside news coverage seeped into deliberations despite the Judge adamantly demanding that jurors not watch any news coverage, that they judge this case strictly on what is presented in court. This could be a huge problem. And what the court is now doing is, the Judge and the attorneys, in chambers, are asking the jury foreperson exactly what information has been essentially been moved into jury deliberations, who was the juror who came in contact with it, what did that juror say to the other jurors. And then after the court is done talking to the foreperson, then the Judge and the attorneys on both sides will then go individually, one at a time if necessary, to question each individual juror about what impact all of this had. In most cases, when a Judge has said there can be no consideration of outside information, and that information gets into jury deliberations, in most cases the court will declare a mistrial.

I've sat on 2 juries - both convictions by the way - and I can say categorically that people are stupid as fuck. The problem, then, is that when you more or less choose a jury out of a random pool of people, you're going to get at least a few really stupid people who have no concept of the rules of logic.

I think most people consider issues from an emotional viewpoint rather than simply looking at circumstances. For example, one of the cases I was a juror on was a theft. The accused had driven a car with his cousin where they found another car to steal the stereo. The cousin got out, the accused drove off, and then came back and got him some minutes later when he had the stereo. The cops pulled them over, arrested both, and recovered the stereo.

Now.. the accused defense went along the lines of "I didn't know what my cousin was going to do, and when I saw the stereo I told him to take it back but the police arrested us before we had a chance to go back."

The accused also went on and on about his wife and young child and how he's trying to take care of them and lots of other emo bullshit.

The judge defined how the law sees theft, with very specific terms and all that. So, in deliberations there were 2 people that went down the "He might have been telling the truth. He may have not known his cousin was going to steal the stereo" route. It took me a good hour to logically beat them down to voting for conviction. I'm sure I never convinced them, but they saw that the rest of us were not going to change our mind, and we would be stuck in that room until they gave in. They obviously didn't value the defendants freedom more than just getting the hell out of there.

It was actually kind of amusing how it went, and as you can imagine, I caused people to get rather irritated. It went something like this;

moron - "Well, he didn't actually steal the stereo".
me - "According to the rules the judge gave us it doesn't matter. You're point is irrelevant."
moron - "He really might have been planning to take it back."
me - "That's irrelevant."
moron - "I just don't think he should go to jail for something his cousin did."
me - "The judge told us not to consider the punishment when determining a verdict. Your point is irrelevant."

Think about that going on for an hour. Ugh.

The main point is, you can have a very obvious situation, and there will always be people who can't understand it. O.J. is "free" because of just those types of people. Criminal justice doesn't really have much to do with justice I don't think. It's all just "managing teh stupid".

/update

WASHINGTON - A juror was dismissed from the trial of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on Monday after court officials learned she had been exposed to information about the case over the weekend.

No mis-trial after all.