It is rare that we get a chance to compare the hysterical media coverage of a trial with the direct experience of someone who was there. Texaco and the $10 Billion Jury is an awesome book by a juror in the Texaco-Pennzoil case (media said that the large award was due to the jury comprising idiots; the juror explained that it was due to an unfortunate strategic decision by Texaco not to present an alternative damages theory and to the jury following the judge’s instructions carefully). Usually, however, unless we want to go down to the courthouse ourselves and pull all of the files we are left with a mostly-clueless reporter’s understanding of what happened.
The lawyer who defended a former Yale student being prosecuted for rape (see Does Saifullah Khan go back to Yale now?) has written an interesting blog post explaining what he did and why.
Related:
- “Call Me, Harvey. I’ll Defend You” (defense lawyer’s take on Harvey’s shower habits)
- “Sorrow Over the Death of Aaron Hernandez” (maybe the most interesting post of all)
Unlike reporters for the NYT, jurors are typically working class people who live in a hard world. Their views of reality are not that finely nuanced that they appreciate all twelve sides of a two sided issue. They are not going to have a lot of sympathy for a woman who ends up dead drunk in a guy’s room and then a day or two later decides she was raped. That is the common sense that is not going to find its way into the NYT but probably how most Americans look at the world. This was a political prosecution since any experienced prosecutor would have known from day 1 that the case was likely a loser. One can only say thank God that criminal cases are decided by juries and that the best and the brightest don’t yet make all the decisions for the rest of us.
> This was a political prosecution
“Religious” seems to me a better fit than “political”. The Moscow show-trials of the ‘thirties showed a greater concern for obtaining something resembling evidence. Facts and evidence are of course not relevant to questions of faith.
This case from the UK shows prosecutors even less interested in credible evidence:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2016/02/08/mark-pearson-cleared-sexually-assaulting-actress-waterloo-station_n_9185748.html
Lord P: Thanks for that link. The UK case is interesting. The guy wasted more than a year of his life and presumably hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal defense costs as a consequence of walking through a subway station. It looks as though it was crazy crowded at the time. The woman who fabricated the story is in her 60s? Maybe she is prematurely senile and believed it?
I used to think that electronic evidence would speed things up. Here’s a recent Texas case where a woman spent 466 days in jail on a murder charge despite cell phone records precluding her from having been on the scene: http://www.lubbockonline.com/news/2018-01-25/jury-convicts-spielbauer-death-ex-wife
America used to be fairly good on this kind of things, as shown by John Adams defending British soldiers. http://www.thehistoryreader.com/modern-history/john-adams-defense-boston-massacre-soldiers/