Friday, April 24, 2009

Sitting in Judgment - Part 1


This past week I had an experience which was a first. I have received jury summons a few times before over the years, but have never served on a jury. In a couple of cases I was excused, in a couple more the case didn't come to trial, and in one case, I just wasn't picked - I had too high a number. This time I was picked. So for the first time, I served on a jury.

This was a criminal case, which although more poignant than a civil case, was more interesting. The case seemed pretty simple - cut and dried, when we first learned of the charge being tried. In fact, I wondered why it had even come to a jury trial at all. The charge was "Failure to Appear," otherwise known as "Bail Jumping." I mean, either the person showed up for court or he didn't.

But as the case unfolded, it appeared that it wasn't as simple as it first seemed. Although we ended up finding the defendant guilty, we did deliberate for almost a couple of hours, and the first "straw" vote we took wasn't unanimous. Although none of us seemed to think he was innocent, several were uncomfortable with some aspects of the case, and weren't sure at first the state had proved it " beyond a reasonable doubt." But as we continued to discuss it, we all came to agree for a verdict of guilty.

Then, we came back in for the punishment part of the trial to determine the sentence. That became really sobering. We learned that "Failure to Appear" is not necessarily even a felony offense, unless the charge for which the defendant was to appear was a felony, which it had been in this case. So the sentencing parameters were a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 10 years. That's pretty stiff. Then we learned that if the defendant found guilty of this charge has served one prior prison sentence, the parameters are 2-20 years. And if the person has two or more prior sentences, they are considered a "habitual criminal" and the minimum sentence is 25 years and the maximum is life or 99 years! Although some mention of this came out during the first part of the trial, during the punishment phase this realization really sunk in. The least we would be sentencing this person was 25 years. The prosecutor wanted us to sentence him to 50 years. In the end, we sentenced him to 30 years.

It's an awesome and terrible responsibility to be in the position to decide a person's fate as we did this week. Of course, it's true that he decided his own fate ultimately by his own behavior, not only the charge we decided, but the other crimes he had committed for most of his adult life. But that still doesn't take away the sober task of sitting in judgment of another person like that.

Yet it still was a good experience in these ways: it is an important thing to do in our society, and it was good in the way all of us who served as jurors, who didn't know each other, worked together and took our task very seriously. It's an important thing to do. I'll have some more to say about this experience next time.

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