I was foreman of a jury on a murder trial once; it’s my signature on the verdict form that sealed the fate of a man. In an extremely real and personal sense, I am directly responsible for putting a man in prison, and given his age, health conditions, and the sentence that was going to be passed, that means I’m directly responsible for ensuring a human being dies in prison.
I ask myself every day if we made the right decision. We passed the bar of reasonable doubt, but we did that entirely because the prosecutor’s office had infinite resources and a homeless Black defendant with HIV and addiction had zero resources and an obviously less than interested (or prepared) public defender who had given up the fight.
If I’d been his lawyer, I’m sure I could have gotten him off, and IANAL… I just would have poked at obvious and extremely reasonable holes in the prosecutor’s story.
Because the prosecutor had nearly infinite resources (victim brought significant press attention) they had nearly infinite power to keep retrying until the defense was simply overwhelmed.
Don’t know a damned thing about this case, but after seeing how the sausage that is the law actually plays out and how very little anything in a real court resembles TV, I don’t think anyone should ever ask a juror to pass a death sentence on someone else. It’s simply impossible to take resource bias out of the equation, and doubt that would have been reasonable if it had just been brought up by an overworked public defender will haunt you… in my case nearly 20 years later.
I ask myself every day if we made the right decision. We passed the bar of reasonable doubt, but we did that entirely because the prosecutor’s office had infinite resources and a homeless Black defendant with HIV and addiction had zero resources and an obviously less than interested (or prepared) public defender who had given up the fight.
If I’d been his lawyer, I’m sure I could have gotten him off, and IANAL… I just would have poked at obvious and extremely reasonable holes in the prosecutor’s story.
Because the prosecutor had nearly infinite resources (victim brought significant press attention) they had nearly infinite power to keep retrying until the defense was simply overwhelmed.
Don’t know a damned thing about this case, but after seeing how the sausage that is the law actually plays out and how very little anything in a real court resembles TV, I don’t think anyone should ever ask a juror to pass a death sentence on someone else. It’s simply impossible to take resource bias out of the equation, and doubt that would have been reasonable if it had just been brought up by an overworked public defender will haunt you… in my case nearly 20 years later.