On Juries and Other Wild Creatures.

Greetings, soon-to-be-faithful readers.  I know I promised an update a while back, but business duties got in the way.  I have been working on some ideas , and will be making more regular updates from here on out.

But I’m breaking the silence with this post, because I have to respond to what’s been going on all over the social-media-verse in the last couple of days.  Specifically, the reactions to the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman.

For anyone who’s been living under a rock for the last 18 months, George Zimmerman is the Florida man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012.  This Saturday (7/13/13), a Florida jury acquitted him on charges of Second-Degree Murder (which included the possibility of finding him guilty of the lesser charge of Manslaughter) (see Fla. Stat. § 782.04(2) and §782.07(1) (2013)), and of using a firearm in the commission of a crime (Fla. Stat. § 775.087(1)(a) (2013) (which provides for a sentencing enhancement on the underlying charge if convicted, though it must be proved separately).  The trial has been televised and picked apart nightly, and I haven’t watched any of it.  I didn’t watch O.J.’s trial either.  I didn’t watch them because what I think about them doesn’t matter.  The only opinions that matter are those of the jury and the judge, and the only people allowed to influence them are the prosecutor and the defense attorney.  Since neither of the above cases were mine, I enthusiastically avoided the whole mess.

But now it’s over.  The verdict is in.  And while I feel a sense of accomplishment at avoiding the trial and all the commentary it’s generated, the wonders of social media have brought the verdict, and its tidal wave of backlash, crashing to my doorstep.  And I find myself possessed of an opinion or two.

There are two themes I’ve seen come up most often: 1) People saying, “They found Zimmerman ‘innocent,'”; and 2) People saying it’s a victory for racism.

First, the jury did not find him “innocent.” That’s not an option available to a jury. They found him “not guilty”. That may seem like semantics, but it’s a distinction that lies at the heart of our system. Specifically, that means they decided that 1) based on the evidence they were presented at trial (and not a year-and-a-half of op-ed pieces in the Washington Post), 2) the prosecutors failed to meet their burden, 3) of *proof beyond a reasonable doubt*, 4) that Zimmerman committed murder or manslaughter–a question which in this case (where the fact of the killing is undisputed) turned on proving Zimmerman’s state of mind.

To say someone was “found innocent” suggests that the jury weighed the evidence and decided that person didn’t do anything wrong–but that’s not the way it works.  The jury doesn’t pass judgment on someone’s life, or decide if they’re a good or bad person.  They decide one thing–whether the prosecution has proved that the defendant committed every element defining the crime.

The Office of the Commonwealth’s Attorney in Bedford, Virginia has a plaque on the wall about the things that make a good prosecutor.  The one I always found myself staring at while I was waiting to talk to one of the prosecutors said, simply, “Remember, moral outrage is not a substitute for proof.”

The classic symbol for justice is a scale, and suggests both sides are equal.  But in a criminal prosecution, a better symbol would be a hurdle, and the prosecution has to clear every one.  If they catch their toe even once, they fail.  Period.  That’s the definition of “innocent until proven guilty,” and also, “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”  Zimmerman didn’t have to prove a goddamn thing.  And the jury found that the prosecution didn’t clear the hurdles, plain and simple.  “Innocent” is just the default state of someone who’s not convicted. I grant that, even today, racism, politics, and simple ignorance can make it easier to clear those hurdles in some cases—the system’s not perfect.  But it’s important to understand how it works before declaring where it’s broken.

Second,  it’s really disturbing to see people declaiming what horrible racists the six women of the jury are. These are six women who, I guarantee, wanted nothing to do with the case, had no desire to spend the past two weeks of their lives listening to this same horror hashed and re-hashed from every angle, and had no interest in being told to pass judgement on George Zimmerman, much less on Trayvon Martin.

In case we all forgot, jury duty is an obligation. It is not voluntary. You don’t get asked if you want to be there—you get told to show up, under penalty of law. No one in their right mind wants to do jury duty—the pay sucks, getting to the courthouse is a pain, parking stinks, you miss work/school/literally anything else you need or want to be doing, and when you go in one morning, you don’t know if you’ll be home by lunch, or—like the present case—have a new career for the next two weeks (Note: according to this, in Florida, your employer might be required to pay your normal wages during jury duty—otherwise, it’s $15 a day for the first three days, and $30 a day after that)

These six women were tasked with a shit job, and it’s clear that they took their duty seriously. They listened to two weeks of testimony—and if you ever have insomnia, try listening to actual court testimony sometime.  There’s a reason even the exciting, scripted testimony on shows like Law & Order only gets shown in 30-second clips.  These women listened to two weeks of it. Then they listened to lawyers try to be impressive at each other for another day.  Then they received instructions on existing Florida law—including the much-discussed stand-your-ground statute (Fla. Stat § 776.012(1) (2013)).  They were not asked their opinion on the law.  They were not given the option of deciding the law was bad.  They were instructed to decide whether the law was violated in this case.  Deciding anything else would have been a violation of the oath each juror takes before the trial ever begins.

If race were the deciding factor in this case, they would never have come back for further deliberation on Saturday morning.  They’d have spent an hour to make it look good, and been home in time for a movie Friday night.

I’m not saying they got it right. I’m not saying they got it wrong. I wasn’t there that night, and I wasn’t a juror for that trial.  But I am saying that just because there’s a dead person—even, as appears in this case, a completely innocent young man who was legitimately just minding his own business—that does not, in and of itself, make it a murder or even a manslaughter. Whether or not a crime occurred is NOT determined by the outrageousness of the outcome. It is determined by whether or not the defendant committed every element of the crime—including having the necessary state of mind.

It’s whether the prosecution cleared all the hurdles.

In the end, what’s most disturbing to me is what all of these comments sound like. People who were not the jurors chosen at trial have decided that they know better than the actual jurors what the outcome should have been.  And all they’re talking about is race.

In case you’re missing my point, that’s how lynch mobs happen.  Just because you’re pissed off on behalf of a teenage black man, instead of at one, doesn’t make your attitude any less distasteful.  No lynch mob ever said, “let’s go string up an innocent man.”  They just knew what they felt was right, and what they felt was wrong, and knew what all their neighbors knew about “those people”.  And they weren’t going to trust the justice system to get it right.  Just because you’re not a three-toothed hillbilly burning a cross in your grandma’s bedsheet doesn’t mean you’re being any better than they were.  You’re just pissed off from the other side.

At the beginning of all this, Trayvon’s parents said, “We simply wanted an arrest. We wanted nothing more, nothing less. We just wanted an arrest, and we got it.” (See previous citation.) George Zimmerman was arrested, tried, and judged.  That’s all anybody gets.  You don’t get to create the “right” outcome.  All you get, if there’s enough evidence to bring a case, is that it gets to be judged.

Zimmerman shouldn’t be anybody’s hero. It’s very clear, now, that he made a terrible mistake. But not all mistakes are crimes—not even, sometimes, the ones that result in a dead child.

Consider this: There was a time when it would have been impossible for a man of Hispanic heritage to get a fair trial in Florida, claiming that he believed he was defending himself against a sympathetic victim—especially in a case that received a lot of media scrutiny.    Maybe people are seeing the racism they want to see.