Mitchell,

    You have a point. 

     The jury could have stopped this at the beginning & if you calmly review the evidence it is hard to see how anyone ever found these men guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

    Unfortunately, jurors are people and when a teenage boy is beaten to death and the police & prosecutors stand in front of them and say it must have been done by these men, they tend to come together and convict.   

    Yes, We should all remember this the next time we serve on juries.

    That said, the jurors do have some excuse in this case.  

       * They did not know that the "confessions" they were given were doctored transcripts and 

       *  They did not know that the limited supporting "evidence" was nonsense.

    It wasn't until the Troopers sat down a couple of years ago and listened to the actual recordings of the interviews that the truth came out.  None of these men ever confessed to anything more than "if you said I did it, then I guess I must of done it".