What?
If I could, I would excuse you (and your offspring if you have any) from ever serving on a jury.
The jury shouldn't consider actual facts? Are you insane?
Have you ever heard the words "reasonable doubt"?
Let me tell you about a jury I served on. The defendant was accused of auto theft. It was made clear to us that to be found guilty, the prosecution had to prove that he intentionally deprived the victim of her property.
We went through 2 days of testimony and while there was absolutely no doubt that the defendant was driving a stolen car (and little doubt that he was wasted - but DUI was not the case before us, so we only heard that he was found passed out crashed into a cul-de-sac with the motor still running), the prosecution had not offered any evidence that he even knew the car was stolen.
His story was that he borrowed it from a friend and no evidence or testimony was entered into the record to suggest otherwise.
On the 3rd day, the judge was forced to declare a mistrial right before closing arguments because of comments made outside the courtroom by a couple of my fellow jurors. After the mistrial was declared, I learned that most of us were leaning towards acquittal because the prosecution had not proven their case. Oh, we were all convinced he wasn't completely innocent, but they hadn't proven him guilty of the charges that were brought.
It's as if the prosecutor expected us to jump to the conclusion that "oh, he had to know that car was stolen and he probably had something to do with it too despite the fact that we didn't present one shred of evidence that he did" and that we would completely ignore the whole part about "reasonable doubt".
I wish I could have seen it play out - were they going to ask us for a lesser charge (like receipt of stolen property) if we couldn't find him guilty of auto theft? I don't know and I still wonder about that to this day.
I suspect this was a case of police and prosecutors telling him to plead guilty rather than going to trial and when he refused to play ball, they incarcerated him until his case worked its way through the court system. (I don't know for sure that he was locked up while awaiting trial, but I'd be willing to bet money that he was).
The 2 comments that led to the mistrial?
"I bet he understands English just fine when he wants to" and "It sounds like the car [NOT the defendant, but the car] had been in a 2-week joyride".
Those comments may sound prejudiced against the defendant, but they were made by fellow jurors who were leaning towards acquittal.
The prosecution MUST prove a defendant's guilt and the obvious withholding of potentially exonerating evidence would be enough for me to vote 'not guilty' in any jury I may ever serve on.
What happened to that video tape? Was it a mere mistake that it was on a manifest of items recovered from the embassy? Was it simply a bad copy with no discernible video on it? If the prosecution wants to claim the former, they better have a reasonable explanation to remove my reasonable doubt. If it was the latter, show me the tape that didn't have any evidence at all on it. (And since the camera was still intact, Hodges could have gone a bit further in showing that the camera was still capable of taking surveillance footage since it probably was given that the camera had not been shot and that they were able to recover the videotape.)
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