Remembering a Jury Trial for the Ages ... Or Just the Month

A day or three back I referred to a trial, and noted that I had been on a jury that had had its sentence changed by the judge. Needless to say, I had a few readers ask what had happened, and since it's Friday, I thought I'd end the week with a story and not an opinion.

I believe it was 1982 or 1983, and we were living in a small town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia, a town of maybe three or four thousand in a rural county of which our town was the county seat. I was the MIS director for an accounting firm there, and we would ultimately buy out the computer shop in the firm to make a service bureau that did services for accounting firms in the area, the start of my entrepreneurial career.

I had gotten a jury summons, which meant in our county that you were to be available over a 60-day period to be called periodically. You'd come in on a Monday, wait to be interviewed for whatever open cases they had, and if there weren't any or if you weren't selected for a case, they'd send you right back to your job and it might be two weeks before you got called again.

This day I did get called, and they asked me to sit on a case that seemed familiar to the other jurors, although not to me. Both sides asked me some questions, and when it became clear I hadn't heard of the case and would be impartial, I was selected. We sat right away and got started; the case would last a couple three days before we got to deliberate. As the Commonwealth had presented, this was a murder case and they were asking for a first-degree verdict from us. So we listened intently.

As things were presented to us, the setting of the crime was a building that was in a little village in the county. It had a post office on one side and a store next to it, with apartments over each one. A young man lived with his family on one side, and a couple lived on the other. The young man heard shots one night, hitting his car parked outside below. He went down to see what was going on, and got shot and killed when he did.

The accused was a fellow in his 20s, I think, who lived in the area. Some footprints of his were found in the area where it would have made sense the shots were coming from, and I think there might have been a ballistics test that led to him as well. Possibly a spent shell or two were found there. Fingerprints were inconclusive, but it appeared pretty sound that the fellow had actually pulled the trigger.

He showed up each day for court dressed in a coat and tie, sitting with his attorney, a walrus-like fellow a couple years older than I, with a genial disposition. The accused never spoke and did not testify. Clearly the idea of the defense was to oblige the prosecution to make the case and hope for the lowest-impact verdict possible.

The prosecutor's first witness was the lady who lived in the other apartment, who was quite distraught when she testified as to what she recalled of that night, surprisingly distraught, thought some of the jurors later (in fairness, it didn't click with me at the time). The police detectives were next, telling what they found and did not find, showing that they had followed standard procedures and indicating that it was not uncommon to have no fingerprints in such a case.

They finished, the defense finished their few witnesses, and we got the instructions.

I believe about three years ago, I mentioned this case in a piece on this site. I used it to point out one of the instructions, concerning circumstantial evidence -- of which there was a lot in this case. The instruction was that we could consider circumstantial evidence if it was "consistent with guilt and inconsistent with innocence", a standard I've used ever since in a variety of situations not related to a court case. Also, we were told that "premeditation can take one second."

Another, of course, applied here. "You are responsible for the natural consequences of your actions", meaning, in this case, if you fire a gun randomly and someone gets hurt, you are responsible as the law allows. That was added to allow this jury to decide that the accused might not have intended to hurt anyone, just to fire at the car, in which case we might decide a charge lower than first-degree murder.

The foreman of the jury was a stockbroker I knew pretty well -- this was a small town, remember. We deliberated collegially, and I recall this curious sense we had as a group, that we had been entrusted with a sacred duty and were not to be influenced. I wondered if juries routinely felt that way.

Ultimately, we found the fellow guilty of second-degree murder, use of a firearm in a felony, and one other charge I forget. We all knew he had done it, but the Commonwealth's Attorney had never presented a motive for us to use to decide premeditation -- not even for one second. We had nothing, so we came back with all we could, which was second-degree murder. The three charges allowed us to sentence the fellow 26 years, and that's what we offered. We got polled when we returned to court and affirmed we each supported the verdict. Then we went home.

Not too long after, we read in the paper that the judge in the case had lowered the sentence to 10 years, without any reason I recall, and if the fellow who pulled the trigger is still alive, he has been a free man for at least 25 years. I was not particularly happy about the reduced sentence; I wasn't afraid of the guy coming after jurors or anything when he got out, but I felt we had done our civic duty and the judge had overruled us. That lasts with me to this day.

So, epilogue ... there has to be one, right? Well, not a year later I had need of a lawyer for something, and so I sought out the murderer's defense attorney, whose office was a short walk from where I worked. Heck, I thought he had been pretty good in court. We went over whatever I went to see him about, and then I mentioned, or he recalled, that I had been on the jury for his client's murder trial.

All of the appeals, if there were any, were done by then, so he was free to talk about the case, and he did. We had never gotten a motive for the murder, he told me, because the Commonwealth never found it -- but there was one.

Remember the wife who lived in the one upstairs apartment, who was so distraught testifying for the prosecution about the events of that night? Well, she had been having an affair with the defendant.

Our defendant was apparently enraged when he found out that she was also having an affair with the young fellow in the other apartment, so he went into the woods near the building one night and started shooting at the kid's car. The kid was really proud of that car, and the shooter figured he would come downstairs to check it out. He did, and that was that. If the jury had known that, we would easily have handed down a first-degree murder conviction.

For years, I've observed jury trials and bemoaned the fact that juries have to go on only what is presented to them. We have a Constitutional right to a jury of our peers, so that won't change, but every time a prominent trial ends with a surprising verdict, I always consider that they can only deliberate on what they are given.

Have a great weekend.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton