I had jury duty. I'd been called a few times before but I wasn't needed. One time I completely forgot about it and didn't show up. I guess they didn't need me that time, either, since there didn't seem to be a warrant out for my arrest. But, this time, they put me on a jury.
A 44-year-old man was charged with punching his girlfriend or former girlfriend who was also the mother of his two children. He had pounded on her bedroom door shouting obscene abuse at her. Their 11-year-old daughter was in her room directly across the hall so she heard all this, heard her mother cry out in pain and testified at the trial.
The defense didn't really challenge the victim or her daughter in cross-examination. The only defense witness, a retired doctor who now worked as a paid witness, testified that the bruise the victim suffered couldn't be from the defendant punching her because there was yellow around it, and that, according to a medical journal article published in the 1990's, took at lease 18 hours to form.
The prosecutor cross-examined the doctor and read from multiple medical journal articles which said that it was impossible to tell how old a bruise was, especially from a photograph where the color may not be accurate.
A question is not evidence, so I wasn't sure how to regard the stuff the prosecutor was reading, but the doctor's only response was to accuse him of taking the quotes out of context. Which was true----quotes or excerpts are out of context by definition. The only question he really answered was whether it was possible to cause a bruise on top of another bruise. It was.
The doctor didn't seem that good, but I was reminded of the kindly old MD who testified on Paul Newman's side in The Verdict. I didn't doubt him, did I?
The defense rested. The prosecution called a rebuttal witness, a child abuse pediatrician. Child abuse cases were his specialty. Bruises, sadly, were his bread and butter.
He was familiar with the study the other doctor cited. He said that information was no longer considered valid. Even the researcher who wrote it changed his mind. There is no way to tell how old a bruise was especially by looking at a photograph.
The defense attorney didn't give up. He began reading things from medical journals about bruising and asked the witness to confirm they were correct. I don't think the things he read had much to do with telling the age of a bruise, but he didn't think the jury would know that.
It made me think of the movie Trial and Error, aka Dock Brief. Peter Sellers plays a failed British lawyer who can't think of a reasonable defense for wife-killer Richard Attenborough so he makes no defense at all. In this case, the defense had been hopelessly crushed, but he didn't give up.
There was also a resisting arrest charge, him shouting obscenities at the cops and spitting on their shoes, which doesn't seem that bad. They had bodycam footage of everything and of the police talking to the victim. There was video of a long interview with the daughter about a month later.
We convicted the guy. The judge came back and talked to us when it was over. He was an old guy, completely bald. I didn't notice until then that he had an earring. He complained about the massive amount of bruise-related evidence. He had to read all the articles mentioned in the trial. He also told us that the defendant was already on probation for strangling the victim, he had been convicted of assaulting her before that and there had been a restraining order against him. Because of all that and the fact that he assaulted her in earshot of their child, he was facing up to five years in prison.
I had been worried about it. I didn't want to make a mistake and convict someone who didn't do it or acquit someone because I didn't know what reasonable doubt was, and even if he was guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt, did I want to be the one to put him in the slam? Now I'm a little disturbed at how easy it was.
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