It was my first time going to jury duty and I got selected for a murder trial. It wasn’t a sequestered trial either so us jurors could walk outside at the end of the day and hear/see the victim’s families and friends speaking openly about what was going on. Obviously we were strictly told to avoid going anywhere that anybody involved would go, but we always ended up in the same places and catch the tail end of a conversation, or seeing the families wearing ‘JusticeforXYZ’ shirts.
The trial was hard. Young kids with horrible childhoods falling into the wrong crowds, it snowballing until someone’s boyfriend ends up dead. Clearly the ones involved had already experienced the criminal life so they’d already known how to cover their tracks and who to trust. The key points of evidence like the murder weapon or cell phone pings were gone before anybody could get arrested. Only one person got caught out of all involved, so they took a plea deal to testify against one of their friends so they wouldn’t take the wrap alone. The attorneys were taking almost everything at face value. The police investigation was botched from the start due to poor training. The witnesses called could barely remember the event happening at all or refused to tell the truth. There were far more people who got called to testify that told police that they definitely heard the ones responsible admit crimes, just so they could get the reward money, hoping nobody would call their bluffs. It was so extremely obvious that the defendant was the gunman and I felt it strongly, but their lawyer made a stronger case that everybody involved was unreliable and couldn’t prove that everybody was where they said they were. That flipped the jury opinion completely. Almost completely.
I was the holdout. We deliberated for days and went over every single piece of evidence. We even got into arguments, I almost got into a fight with another juror who wasn’t budging from a not-guilty verdict because she also had a rough childhood. You would be surprised at the number of people who would disregard their better judgement because they didn’t want to be the one to send a possibly-innocent person to prison for life. Because there wasn’t enough to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, because the evidence suggested an additional person’s involvement who was neither present nor questioned by the investigation, because nobody wanted to make the wrong decision.
There was only an hour left of the day and we needed a verdict or else it would have ended in a mistrial. The other jurors spent the entire day trying to tell me that the attorneys failed to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt therefore this person could not be convicted. I argued that there was plenty enough, but the discrepancies with evidence were too hard to ignore. They all believed that if some day, more concrete evidence surfaced to prove otherwise, then this person would see justice once and for all. In my heart of hearts I knew this was wrong. Against my better judgement, I relented.
I’ll never forget the air leaving the room when the judge announced a not-guilty verdict. I still remember the look on the defendant’s face, or the way their family began crying tears of joy while the victim’s ran out hysterically wailing into the halls.
It has been many years now and the only other person involved is serving a life sentence while the gunman went into hiding. The victim’s family was completely torn apart. The young girlfriend of said victim turned to alcoholism to numb the pain. The victim will never come back. There was no justice. I witnessed the failure of the judicial system, law enforcement, and the people involved in the trial. And I cannot remove the weight off my consciousness that I let a guilty man walk free, and everybody is worse off because of it.