It was a crack-cocaine possession and sale case. The defendant was a young African-American woman. The alleged amount of cocaine in her possession was a few grams. It was a twelve person jury. Seven women and five men. Ten white and two black members and the average age skewed older.
The principle witness for the prosecution was the arresting police officer. Iirc he was white but it could have been Latino. The prosecutor helpfully provided a diagram of the alleged crime site and the cop testified as to where he’d been, what he’d seen, what he did, and when he did it.
The cop lost me from the get-go as a simple sketch from the dimensions the prosecutor and witness supplied indicated that the officer’s first alleged observation would have been impossible. Other jurors had difficulty with other elements of the officer’s narrative (most of which I also agreed with). After a somewhat heated first deliberative session, we were split with seven for acquittal and five for guilty. Two of the five (both women, one black and one white) expressed some reservations. Two others (both sixtyish, both women and also one white and one black) spoke little but appeared to be reasonably confident in their vote. The last of the five was an elderly white man who may have made his decision based on one look at the defendant.
That elderly white male juror was the last one to be seated. And then only because of a lengthy voir dire, he was the last one left in the jury pool and only thirteen people had been empaneled. By luck of the draw, he was on the jury and not an alternate. Not that it mattered as one juror and one alternate had been excused by the time deliberations began.
We reported the lack of consensus to the court and the judge told us to come back tomorrow and work harder.
The next day before we entered the deliberation room, the conflicted African-American woman excitedly began to tell us a couple of us what she’d seen when she drove past the site of the alleged crime. I stopped her right there.
We were finished.
The only question left was what we reported back to the court.
We gathered and took one more vote: nine for acquittal and three for guilty. The white woman that changed her vote had had a sleepless night until she had a revelation that it didn’t matter how implausible she found the defendant’s story if she wasn’t persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt by the prosecution.
We reported that we were hopelessly deadlocked. Odds were decent that at some point two of the hold-outs would have wanted to go home. However, as sure as I can be of anything, that old white man would have sat in that room until he died before changing his vote. But racism began long before we were in that jury room.
From our racist (and stupid) drug laws that disproportionately target people of color. To disproportionate law enforcement focus on people of color. To the prosecutorial overcharging of crimes against people of color. In this particular case, the defendant had an excellent public defender that didn’t force her to accept a plea and represented her very well at the trial, but that’s not the norm.
Does it matter that the official record only recorded one of the reasons why we had a mistrial?
