When Unreasonable Assumptions Replace Reasonable Doubt

What is perhaps the most bothersome aspect of the recent CMA jury verdict is the lack of time it took to achieve. A trial that lasts months, not days, and involves 350+ pieces of evidence and several serious “death penalty” charges to consider, demands a jury willing to deliberate based on the evidence, not pesonal perception.

Anyone who has ever sat on the board of an organization that must make decisions knows it’s impossible to achieve consensus quickly. On a jury of 12 strangers, there are 12 opinions regarding guilt/innocence, not instant unanimity, and bringing consensus to a panel of 12 people based on trial evidence that took months to present takes days or weeks to decide, not mere hours ... unless the jurors each had already decided guilt/innocence prior to deliberations, which is a violation of their sworn duty.

A made-for-TV play applies today, 50 years after its first live presentation (1957): 12 Angry Men, based on the premise that an all-male jury puts personal prejudice before justice once the jurors are sequestered and begin deliberation. Rather than debate, it becomes berate, wherein the loudest and most angry juror pressures the others to accept his verdict as their own. As is often the case, he has other places to be, other things to do, and he is not going to waste his time discussing anything because he already “knows” that the defendant is guilty. Henry Fonda plays the juror who demands debate based on reason, a thinking skill, not an emotional reaction to one’s personal childhood baggage. He points out the lack of logic in the prosecution’s case, a railroad track that rests on racism as its foundation. There was no investigation, just presumption, and had the most forceful juror not been challenged to justify his racially-motivated verdict choice, a young man would have spent his life in jail.

Today, my msn.com horoscope reminds me that “in groupthink situations, sometimes the best answer is not the right answer -- it's the answer that everyone agrees on,” especially if/when the most forceful person in the room becomes the dictator of decision-making. There can be no whatever approach to determine guilt in a crime wherein a child dies because there is no do-over if/when the alleged perpetrator is found not guilty. There can be no alternate theory that is based on exposing childhood insecurities, tugging at the juror’s emotional heartstrings, or picking a fall guy to pin the charges on regardless of the lack of evidence. A juror may not like where the evidence leads, but it is a journey that all jurors must take together.

When any juror in a murder trial says after the fact that, "at first, we were split 6-6," it indicates that a re-examination of the testimony, as well as the evidence, is not just indicated, but demanded. Six jurors who believe the opposite of the other 6 jurors must be influenced by the evidence presented in court, not by emotional supposition based on what an individual may believe. Convincing 6 jurors on the evidence to change their votes in a mere 10 hours strains credulity, but badgering 6 jurors to go along to get along, especially after a long two months spent apart from family, makes the horoscope advice seem plausible: the best answer is not always the right answer, but simply the answer that everyone agrees on, especially if there is still time to save a long-planned cruise or enjoy a traditional July 4th family celebration.

I am further concerned about a jury consultant bragging about her use of “social media” to influence the jury: allegedly, where the prosecutions’ case was strongest against the defendant, it was recommended to attack the family dynamic based on the trending of social media postings. People didn’t believe George, hated Cindy, and dissed Lee, so the defense keyed in on those perceptions as implied testimony, rather than dealing with the facts in evidence, including the huge mountain of continuous lies and behaviors of the accused. “Throwing [someone in the family] under the bus” became the defense tactic when there was no plausible defense of the accused person. Jurors were allowed to substitute emotional expediency for legal reasonable doubt – and then sell their stories to the media as payback for the almost 2 months that they were separated from their families, friends, and jobs while serving on the jury.

I’m concerned about what lies ahead because a precedence has been set that redefines reasonable doubt as personal perception as each juror’s reality in a trial, rather than the truth based on the evidence presented in court, whatever it is. Groupthink means that whatever the strongest member in a group thinks, the others go along: today, it's called trending, but going along to get along is not evidence. There is no denying the jailhouse tapes, there is no denying the lies, the misrepresentations, the deception, the basic dishonesty, but there is also no denying that the specious allegations against CMA’s family were NOT evidence, but merely unsupported emotional allegations. The case was one of reasonable doubt about the person on trial, not unreasonable assumptions about the people surrounding the person on trial.

As one of the TV pundits put it, if I walk outside and see the earth is wet everywhere around me, I can pretty safely assume that it rained – even if I did not personally witness the rain falling.