LUCAS: More often than not, deliberating dozen will get it right

John Lucas

The aftermath of the George Zimmerman trial brings to mind an old story about juries and verdicts. I can’t attest to its veracity; in fact, I suspect it’s just one of those somewhat instructive old lawyer tales.

Nonetheless, in Kentucky, juries in most cases set the sentence if they find a person guilty of a crime. And in the case at bar in this instance, a man was accused of a relatively minor infraction, and in his impassioned closing argument to the jurors, the prosecutor asked they find the scofflaw guilty and sentence him to 30 days in the county jail.

After a short period of deliberation, the jury returned with the desired guilty verdict and a recommended sentence of not 30 days in the county jail but six months.

When after a few days the prosecutor chanced to encounter one of the jurors on the street, he inquired why the harsh sentence.

“Well, sir,” the juror explained, “we knew more about this case than what came out in court.”

And thus it exposes the several vagrancies of the jury system. Jurors take their life experiences into the jury room with them, and despite their pledge, they don’t always limit their considerations to only what they hear in the courtroom or follow exactly the letter of the law.

That’s why after 40 years as a newspaper reporter attending courts and trials ranging from the old county and city courts to state appeals courts and federal district courts, I’d tremble at putting my fate into the hands of a dozen of my peers.

It also goes a long way to explain why innocent people sometimes plead guilty and accept a lenient plea bargain rather than chance going before a jury.

On occasion, I have sat through trials convinced that prosecutors have failed to meet their burden of proof and that the accused did not deserve to be convicted, only to see a jury return a unanimous verdict of guilty.

On other occasions, the opposite has been the case. The facts and the law have demanded a guilty verdict, but the 12 people whose decision matters saw it otherwise.

Laws can be complex, nuanced and difficult to understand.

When they don’t understand, jurors simply can throw up their hands and return a not-guilty verdict, or they can go with the premise that if a person has been arrested and charged, he’s guilty, if not of this charge, of something else.

Attorneys in their quest to achieve a jury composed of people who have not formed an opinion in the matter at bar, instead strive for people who are ignorant of the issue at hand. All too often, they achieve instead a jury that is just ignorant.

As to whether the jury in the Zimmerman case got it right, I don’t know. I wasn’t there; I didn’t hear the facts. Because of that, I’m not inclined to second guess them.

Despite its flaws and the trepidations anyone going on trial should feel, the jury system is the best system we’ve been able to devise.

Get a dozen people in a room, and more often than not, they’ll get it right.


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