specialagency.net: Fair and impartial.

April 06, 2004

Fair and impartial.

The hidden punchline to my last post on the Araujo trial is that no one appears to be claiming that the defendants aren't the guys who did it. I mean, all the potential jurors got the civics lesson from the judge on the first day: things you read in the newspaper or saw on the television are not evidence, things the lawyers say in the courtroom are not evidence, things your friends said about the case are not evidence. The only things you may consider as evidence are things that come from sworn testimony on the witness stand. What the lawyers say during voir dire, even, that's not evidence.

But still. What the lawyers said during voir dire was basically this: there are a number of facts not in dispute. The victim was a teenager who was one gender biologically but presented a different gender socially. The victim engaged in sexual acts with at least one of the defendants. The defendants, on finding out that a girl they'd fucked at a party had a penis, were enraged. The victim was brutally and horribly murdered. All of those things are being taken for granted by both sides. Other things are only being implied. One of the defense lawyers keeps pressing jurors on the difference between murder and manslaughter, asking whether they understand the difference between premeditated crimes and "heat of passion" crimes. Another defense lawyer keeps talking about "sexual deceit" or "sexual deception" and whether or not jurors think it's reasonable to have a violent or emotional reaction to such deceit or deception.

At the end of all of it, I'm not surprised that jury selection is moving slowly. My guess is that a lot of the prospective jurors are saying something similar to what I said, that I came in to this prepared to assume innocence, but the strong suggestion of guilt in the lawyers' lines of questioning has made me feel hostile towards the defendants. The article says that one of the lawyers asked a juror "If someone near and dear to you, a close family member or friend, were on trial for these same charges, would you want 12 people with your ... present state of mind to judge that case?" The woman in the article said no.

I was asked that same question, and I said no. The "present state of mind" is different--the woman in the article had a brother who'd been murdered, but in my case it was that I have friends who live every day in the fear of this kind of thing happening to them. If I were a family member of one of the defendants, I wouldn't want twelve people like me on that jury. I wouldn't want one person like me on that jury.

Posted by Susan at April 6, 2004 01:55 PM

Comments

I was scheduled for jury duty this week, so it's interesting to me that I ended up not having to report. Even if this trial wasn't ready to start processing another panel, I'd have thought that it would be taking potential jurors away from other cases.

Is there a precedent out there of a rape victim killing her (or his) attacker after the fact and being convicted on the lesser charge of manslaughter? Because that's the link the defense appears to be aiming for with their allusion to date rape as "sexual deception".

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