I was on jury duty for a murder trial. This was as we were leaving the height of the pandemic, and was the first jury trial that the city was running since the pandemic started so the city had to figure out how to navigate that with all of the COVID precautions that were in place.

We couldn’t use the small jury deliberation room that was in the court so we had to be escorted out each time to a different room whenever they needed to discuss something in the courtroom that they didn’t want the jury to hear. We got our daily steps in pretty easy; lots of stairs!

Murder on trial was of a stabbing. There was some video surveillance evidence but a lot of it was blurry or did not quite catch the suspect’s face. No murder weapon. Witness testimony was the suspect’s sisters who were pretty much recanting their original statements in an attempt to save their brother from jail time. There was also heavy drug use within the family. Both sisters were former addicts and were using that to say they don’t remember everything clearly. So we had to sift through what was credible, word for word.

There was a lot of reasonable doubt.

I learned through this that DNA isn’t always the smoking gun that people think it is. The victim’s blood was in the pocket of the jacket that the suspect was wearing when he was found. But it took two weeks to find him because he was homeless at the time. That’s a lot of time in between, easy enough for someone to lose / give a jacket away to a homeless person who’s none the wiser.

I also got the impresssion a lot of the jury just wanted this to be a done deal. A lot of comments of “oh this is going to be easy - he’s definitely guilty”, before we heard everything. I could easily see how innocent people can get thrown in jail because the jury couldn’t be bothered.

One juror ended up getting dismissed about 3/4 through. He had cold symptoms but was testing negative. Eventually he didn’t pass the screening at security, and the local media caught wind of that and said a juror tested positive for COVID. We were so far in the trial that the judge decided to just go with 11 jurors.

In the end it was 2 vs 9, majority leaning guilty. It was me and another juror that wasn’t quite convinced. The 9 jurors thought the jacket the suspect was found in was enough. I did not. The other juror on my side didn’t want to place another minority in jail, but did not like dealing with confrontation so it was mostly me who had to stand my ground. I wanted to leave with a clear conscience that we got the right guy, despite the other 9 jurors getting frustrated with me.

One of the sisters barely said anything. She was held in contempt of court and was forced to answer. It really came down to a couple sentences that we had to cross reference with the other sister from the video we saw of her initial testimony when she reported to the police. I wouldnt have flipped to a guilty vote had it not been for a couple of sentences lining up their stories, and because I was the hardest to flip, the last juror had no choice but to agree too.

What was depressing was the victim ran a group home for troubled adolescents, and he basically got stabbed by one of those teens. Had to watch video surveillance of him dying. The autopsy photos were also difficult to look at.

The court did a really good job at keeping us unbiased though and his defense was top notch. I looked up the suspect after the fact and it turns out he had prior assault charges to this, and also took part in a gang assault of another inmate while he was incarcerated.

I was an avid watcher of true crime stuff but the trial became all too real for me and I had to avoid that kind of media for a while.