That jury thing

I write this with Caylee Anthony in mind. I write, actually, in defense of the jury.

I am so incredibly saddened by what happened to Caylee that I have no words. My porch light most assuredly was on at 9:00 tonight. I cannot comprehend a mother who, even if we accept her account of events, was partying for the month between the time her daughter disappeared and the time she finally got around to telling someone. I'm married to a mom of 35 years. Two of our daughters are moms. I work with a lot of moms, and am related to a lot of other moms. The very minute any child of any of them came missing, every single one of them would have given a whole new meaning to "raising hell." NOBODY - least of all, them - would have been spending a minute partying until their kid was found.

So, I think Casey Anthony killed Caylee Anthony. I think Casey Anthony got away with murdering her daughter.

Wait - I thought this was supposed to be a DEFENSE of the jury?

Yes.

I have sat on juries twice. Both  were criminal trials. Both were cases involving sexual assault of a student on a college campus in the Quad Cities. In both cases I served on the jury through the reaching of a verdict. In one case I was the jury foreman. One of the juries convicted. The other acquitted.

(This gets a little graphic here.)

The first trial involved a staff maintenance man at Augustana College who had sex with a student summer worker. Her account: he cornered her in a restroom in a dorm. He forced her to the floor, pulled off her shorts, and assaulted her. His account: she purchased condoms ahead of time; at the end of the work day they went to a dorm room. There was foreplay, followed by intercourse. The fact of sexual intercourse was not in dispute. The question: was this a rape that occurred in a bathroom, or was this consensual sex that occurred in a dorm room?

We convicted. At one point, after a few hours of deliberation, I asked my fellow jury members, "Does anybody seriously think anything at all happened in that dorm room?" We all said, "No." But we weren't absolutely certain. We wondered why the Rock Island Police Department did no investigating of that dorm room. (Answer: the suspect didn't even mention the dorm room until later. It was no crime scene.) We would have loved to know if there was any evidence of sexual activity in that dorm room, but the evidence at trial was silent. What we found out after the trial: the defense had lab people search that room with a fine-toothed comb. If they had found so much as a hair from either suspect or victim, game over for the prosecution. But the lab folks found nothing. Neither of these people had ever been in that room.

Wouldn't we have loved to know that in deliberations? But we couldn't know that. For the police that room wasn't a crime scene. The rest room was. For the defense, they knew there was no trace their man had ever been there, but the defense is under no obligation to present that at trial. So, there was something we just didn't know.

We convicted. A couple of months later the suspect was sentenced. Before sentencing, the judge affirmed that he thought we'd reached the right verdict, and sentenced the convict to 15 years.

And I replayed that trial again and again, in my waking hours and in my dreams. This was a family man whom we separated from his family (the thought later occurred to me that, even accepting his version, he was going to have sex with a college student in a dorm room. Not very family-friendly, I'd say.)

A couple of years after, I Googled the convict, just to see what turned up. He'd committed suicide in prison. And again, the waking reflections - the dreams - the nightmares. This trial stayed with me - was there any way around the verdict? Was there any possible alternative outcome? Eventually I made my peace with it. I didn't rape that girl. I'm just not bolted together like that. He raped her. I didn't tie that bedsheet around that light fixture. . .I just did the duty I was called to do.

The second trial, we acquitted. The girl was a student at St. Ambrose. She had celebrated her finishing her final exams in her senior year. The celebration involved about 10 beers and a Jager. She went to her dorm and went to bed. She woke up to find a hand where she'd given no permission for a hand to be. She screamed, and the assailant ran off. She had a roommate who woke up with the scream. But, the roommate saw no one. All I could think was, ten beers and a Jager. I don't even know if anything happened at all.

In the case of the Augie student, the assailant was well-known to the victim. The St. Ambrose student didn't make an ID until months later, and she made it from a newscast. The Augustana case was handled by the Rock Island Police Department, who knew a crime scene when they saw it and did understand evidence. The St. Ambrose case was handled by campus security, who obviously didn't. They did get Davenport PD involved - four days later. Davenport PD noticed that there was only one way out of the building (except emergency exits, which would have sounded an alarm.) Davenport PD noticed that the one way out had a security camera. They noticed it four days later. D'ya kinda think that if Davenport PD had been called immediately, it would have taken them two seconds flat to say, "That camera - where's the tape?!" But four days later. . .

So please don't think too harshly of the Anthony jury. The missing pieces of information they would have loved to have seen - a cause and time of death, for starters - will drive them crazy. It's one thing to say, "I think Casey Anthony is a murderer." It's quite another to say, "I have seen evidence that is convincing beyond a reasonable doubt that Casey Anthony killed her daughter."

And let's not think that Casey Anthony has an easy road from here on out. For the rest of her life she will be the one who murdered her own daughter and got away with it. I don't forecast a surfeit of prospective employers. She threw her entire family under the bus in the trial; I doubt that she can go home again. Maybe some network will pay for an interview. I don't know.

Thanks for hanging out. Love your reactions.