ArtD0dger
06-26-2007, 11:37 PM
I was on a jury about six months ago, and while I’ve told the story many times, I’ve never written about it. It was mostly reassuring to see the justice system work reasonably well, but there were a few disconcerting elements. It was a very interesting case. Forgive me if I go into too much detail here -- there are still lots of things I’m leaving out.
I reported as directed at the beginning of the afternoon on the appointed day. There was a lot of waiting around, and then finally the bailiff addressed us and showed us a short video. Then there were some questions and answers, and the dismissal of one or two unwilling idiots (“Is this gonna take all afternoon? ‘Cause I left my dog in my truck.”)
Then they took us to the courtroom where the players were assembled. The attorneys, a male prosecutor and a female defense attorney, were both white, middle aged, and sharply dressed. A plain-clothes officer sat with the prosecutor. The defendant did not look at all like a “criminal.” He was a trim white male whose age was given away mainly by his light gray hair. He followed the jury selection process intently -- sometimes even smiling -- and gave every impression of a man who fully expected to be exonerated.
The judge directed the process of jury selection, which took quite a long time. I thought it was a long shot that I would be selected. They had a large jury pool, and I’ve heard that lawyers on both sides do not like analytical-minded jurors (I'm an engineer). But after they had seated ten of the twelve jurors, my name was called.
They asked me some boilerplate questions. Then the defense attorney questioned me and committed the first of her many gaffes. She said, “If we were to send you to the jury chamber right now, what verdict would you return?” Without thinking too hard, I immediately replied “I couldn't possibly return a verdict now.” “Ah!” she retorted, “don’t you mean to say that you would have to find my client not guilty?” “Oh yeah, I guess I would,” I agreed. She was right, of course, but the whole ‘gotcha’ maneuver was very off-putting. I wondered how she could possibly think that it served the interests of her client. But after more questions, I was accepted as a juror.
After the twelfth juror was selected, we heard opening statements. It was a stalking case. The prosecutor told us that the defendant was stalking and harassing the plaintiffs, a married couple, and was causing them extreme distress and suffering. He said that the defendant would send dozens and dozens of bizarre letters, which were threatening and sexually inappropriate. He said that this was a long established pattern of behavior, and that we were going to hear testimony from previous victims as well.
The defense attorney, for her part, reminded us that the defendant was presumed innocent. She said that we shouldn’t be surprised if we heard very little from her or her client, because it was the prosecution that had to meet the burden of proof and do all the work. She portrayed the situation as a big misunderstanding, comparing it to someone who sends you unwanted e-mail jokes. She said the defendant kept sending these letters and everything because he was never told his attention was unwelcome.
Testimony began the next morning. The first witness was one of the defendant’s alleged previous victims. We were instructed that the defendant was not being tried for her case, and that the testimony was included only to establish a pattern of behavior. The woman was attractive, well-dressed, and apparently well-heeled. She had flown in from a thousand miles away for a single day just to testify. The prosecutor questioned her and painted a picture of the ordeal that she had suffered starting 25 years ago, and lasting over a decade. I detected a certain weariness, as though she had answered these questions 100 times before. She was serious, a bit nervous, and assiduously avoided looking in the direction of the defendant except very briefly when asked to identify him. She had known him briefly and dated him two or three times. Afterwards, he started sending her dozens, and eventually hundreds, of letters and postcards, and showing up in places where she was likely to be. She said she had always rejected his advances after those first few dates, but the letters kept coming even after she had moved to another state and married another man. The prosecutor read from some of the letters and showed one on the projector. The defendant would obsessively cram tiny little writing into every square millimeter of a postcard. The letters were rambling and bizarre. He would go on and on about his love for her, and about the imaginary children they supposedly had. Other letters were angry, and expressed his rage and frustration at not being able to be with her.
The second witness was another woman who had gone through a similar ordeal. She described how when she had moved (in part to escape him), he had taken to writing to her parents instead. The prosecutor read one of these letters wherein the defendant angrily insisted that he considered their daughter to be his wife, and demanded to know when she was finally going to grow up and come live with him. There were other incidents and hundreds of these letters, many of which the parents had saved. Like the first witness, the second victim had been stalked by this guy for more than ten years.
The defense attorney was true to her word, and did very little to rebut what seemed like incredibly damning testimony. She asked very few questions in cross examination, and never challenged the facts of the events, only their interpretation.
About then we broke for lunch. Over the course of the morning, it had become blatantly obvious that the defendant was rather profoundly disturbed. I was somewhat irritated that I was going to be asked to make a criminal judgment about someone who was plainly mentally ill.
After lunch we heard testimony from the actual plaintiff couple. First we heard from the woman. She explained how she had known the guy for a couple of years from pickup basketball. At one point she invited all of her gym acquaintances to a New Year’s Eve party, him included. Apparently, that was when he fixated on her. At first there were just a few awkward uninvited visits, but then the letters started arriving.
One burst of six communiqués in three days included a particularly disturbing post card that prompted them to call the cops. It was addressed to the husband. The defendant seemed to be angrily warning the husband not to get between him and the wife. He was very concerned about the imaginary child that he had had, or was going to have, with her. There were no direct threats as such, but there were evocations of violence, and the whole thing had a generally incoherent and agitated tone. It had phrases like, “Don’t do it Dan -- don’t kill our child.”
The couple began working with the officer -- a police detective -- who started uncovering things about the guy. The couple did not know where the defendant lived, only that he would visit or be seen lurking around in a red pickup truck. The letters had either a post office box return address or no postage at all, indicating they had been placed in the mailbox by hand. A baby’s shoe was also delivered like this. The prosecutor related how they had tracked down the vehicle registration, and then delivered one of his biggest bombshells: the defendant had actually registered his truck at the couple’s address. There was no other address for him, and no way to locate him. There were more letters and incidents, and then a few months later the defendant let it be known that he was going to attend a public slide show given by the husband. He did, and the cops picked him up there.
It turns out that the guy was homeless and had been living out of his truck for the last fifteen years. This was all the stranger because he was at least intermittently employed during this time, and he apparently had substantial inherited assets. He was actually quite a bright guy -- he had a graduate degree and several publications in a natural science field.
We came in the next day for final testimony and deliberations. The last item was a tape recording of the conversation between the detective and the defendant on the night he was arrested. The defendant waived his rights to have a lawyer present -- we heard that on the tape -- although it was a long and drawn out process before he said as much. The detective was quite professional and fair, and kept relating the facts of the case and asking the guy if just maybe he could see why people might have a problem with his behavior. The defendant strenuously denied that he could have done anything wrong. He insisted that he was very close to the plaintiffs, and that they had “invited him into their lives.” This went on for a while, with the defendant expressing ever more surprise and giving ever more convoluted explanations for why all these things he had been doing were completely ok. The most damning exchanges went something like this:
“Don’t you remember what happened with [victim 1] and [victim 2]? Can’t you see that you’re repeating the pattern of behavior that got you into so much trouble?”
“Yes, but that was their problem, not mine.”
And
“You do know that there’s not a real child involved here, don’t you?”
“(Irritated) Well of course I know THAT. But the important thing is that I’m completely COMMITTED to there being a child.”
We never heard the defendant speak except for on the tape, but he did react very emotionally to a lot of the testimony. At the end of the tape, he was almost at the point of tears. It was sad and pathetic, and you’d think he was reacting to having his fantasy world come crashing down around him. But considering how many times this had apparently happened before, he was probably just moving on to the next rationalization.
One thing that was conspicuously omitted was any explanation of what had happened in the previous cases. There obviously had been some sort of reckoning, but we had no idea whether he had been convicted, whether they had tried to treat him, or anything other than the oblique reference by the detective. It was also bizarre to be hearing all this and yet have no one, especially the defense attorney, willing to say out loud that the guy was crazy. During her closing arguments she continued her attempt to paint her client as just some poor misunderstood soul. She committed another gaffe when, noting that there were several technical professionals on the jury, she suggested that we might be the sorts of people who could understand what it was like to “march to a different drummer.” That one was really quite insulting.
The prosecutor’s closing argument basically reiterated the case he had been building up. He did quite a good job throughout the trial, and generally seemed to be the voice of reason. There were a couple times where I think he went a bit over the top -- one of the witnesses testified that the defendant wanted to run off with her and “live off the land,” and the prosecutor went on to suggest that she was extra terrified because he was, *gasp*, a hunter! The judge was a no-nonsense stand-up kind of guy, and the defense attorney seemed rather inapt by comparison. She made a final attempt to alienate the jury during the prosecutor’s closing argument. He said something to the effect that there might be some form of treatment available for the defendant if he were convicted, and she burst out interjecting, “That’s a lie! This is a felony charge, and they’re going to send him to prison!” The judge immediately ordered us to disregard this statement and have it stricken from the record. He said this with the sort of weary aplomb that suggested that this was exactly the sort of stunt he was used to from this particular attorney.
By the end of the testimony, I had pretty well overcome my reservations about convicting a mentally ill person. The problems he created and the persistence of his behavior really did seem to demand intervention. But we had not heard anything about the actual law(s) that he had allegedly broken, and I intended to apply the letter of the law to the best of my ability. Our briefing on the law came in the form of ten or so pages of jury instructions presented by the judge. He went over them one by one and discussed several points. Then we were sent to the jury room to deliberate.
I had no indication of the other jurors’ reactions. We had been instructed not to discuss the trial with each other, so until then all our interactions had been small talk. When we got to the jury room, nobody spoke for about half an hour. The jury was mostly white -- possibly with one or two Hispanics -- which would not represent an unusual draw in our community. There were six men and six women, with no particular tilt in any social characteristic as far as I could tell. We all silently pored over our jury instructions and examined the many letters and postcards that had been left with us as evidence.
I went through the instructions. Most of the items were incontrovertible boiler plate conditions that I don’t really remember. As for the defendant’s state of mind, we had only to find that he knowingly performed the actions that caused the harm, not that he knew such harm would be caused. In the end, the whole case turned on whether harm was suffered by the victims. I wish I could remember the exact phrase -- it was something like “excessive harm and suffering.” The judge had paid special attention to this phrasing during our instruction, and told us that there was no further legal elaboration of this standard. Our job was to determine whether the victims had suffered this, whatever it was.
There seemed to be no legal consideration for the defendant’s mental condition. In his defense, one could argue that most (though not quite all) of what constituted his supposed crime consisted simply in writing letters. The case we were trying was clearly less egregious than those of the previous victims. The current case had lasted less than a year, whereas the previous victims were each stalked for over a decade. In the current case, the couple had gone straight to the police and had never confronted the defendant to get him to stop. The defense attorney made a big deal of this. But the previous victims had both repeatedly rejected his advances to no avail. In the end it was very easy to sympathize with the victims. They had been living in a sort of state of siege where they avoided being seen outside, and they closed the curtains and turned off the lights in order to hide their presence in their own home. They kept a baseball bat by the door. It was obvious that having a disturbed stalker would cause an ordinary person to live in a state of fear, and one would be justified to avoid upsetting him. It seemed highly unlikely he would spontaneously change his conduct, though he might well move on to another victim. The guy had never actually been violent, and perhaps he never would have been. Even he still deserved the benefit of the doubt with regard to his intentions. When he was in a good mood, his rambling letters actually had something of a chivalrous tone as he expressed his devotion to the women and their imaginary families. But we were not asked to make a judgment about his capacity for violence, only whether harm had already been done.
I decided that if I had been in the position of the victims, and if I had gone through the entire ordeal only to see the guy walk, then I would have been outraged. I would be even more outraged if it turned out he had already walked before, which may well have been the case here. I would probably conclude that the state had broken its end of the social contract, and I might even begin to consider more extreme and less civil methods for taking my protection into my own hands. So I concluded that the experience of the couple rather clearly constituted “excessive harm and suffering,” and that the proper verdict was guilty. The only way I could come up with a “not guilty” would be to disregard the instructions and take a jury nullification stance. This case certainly did not warrant that.
By then, the other jurors had mostly emerged from their solitary deliberations. We selected a foreman and decided to take an anonymous straw poll to see where we stood. We were to decide on two counts, one for the wife and one for the husband. The woman next to me immediately wrote “guilty, guilty” on her slip of paper without bothering to hide her verdict. I wrote the same. We passed the slips to the foreman, and she read them aloud. “Guilty … guilty ...” it took a tense minute or two to go through all of them, but there were 24 guilties in a row. We were unanimous.
The serious mood in the room lifted instantly, and everybody started talking back and forth. The consensus seemed to be that you would have to be crazy to even consider a not guilty verdict. One guy -- “Thank god. I was afraid there would be that one flakey holdout, and we would be stuck here arguing all day.” I certainly expressed no reservations, for I had not come particularly close to the opposite judgment. At that point I suspect we were all just a bit relieved to avoid contentious deliberations. I’m sure other jurors had more nuanced opinions about the whole experience as well.
I had sort of expected that we would go through the instructions and justify our position, but there was really no point anymore. People talked on and on about how creepy the defendant was, and how arrogant the defense attorney had been. I looked through a bunch more letters and postcards and what I saw only confirmed our verdict. There was one particularly nasty profanity-laced postcard -- I don’t remember exactly what it said -- and he could be plenty scary even when he was in a good mood. (“It’s such a lovely day! Gosh I’d love to jump your bones!”)
Presently, we went back into the courtroom and delivered the verdict. The defense attorney expressed no emotion, and the defendant none other than to hang his head. The plaintiffs hugged silently. That was that.
Afterwards, the judge came into the jury room to meet the jurors. The first words out of his mouth were “Wasn’t that bizarre?!” He thanked us for our service, then chatted and answered questions for a few minutes. It sounded like this was a fairly extraordinary case even by the standards of his long tenure on the bench.
On the way out, several of us also got a chance to talk with the prosecutor and the detective. They said that in the previous cases the defendant had gotten at most a misdemeanor, with short sentences and counseling. At one point, his counselors had monitored him for a long time and thought he was under control. But the investigation in this new case had revealed that during this period he had actually been writing the letters to the parents of the second victim in another state. The prosecution had offered a plea bargain, but they felt that given the repeated offenses they needed at least one felony count in exchange for a reduced sentence and an agreement to submit to intrusive treatment. The defendant never acknowledged that there was anything wrong with his behavior, and resisted any effort to curtail his freedom.
The defense attorney apparently had no inclination to deal either. She seemed to have something of a reputation among the local legal community. I asked the prosecutor if there ever was a realistic chance of acquitting this guy, and he said that you never know what will happen with a jury. Sometimes, you get someone who won’t convict no matter what the evidence, especially in a liberal college town like ours. It strikes me now that while people like that think they’re making a brave social statement, they are also making the justice system capricious and unpredictable. The unintended consequence here was a lawyer and client willing to gamble with the latter’s freedom.
The sentencing was scheduled for two months later, and I never did find out what happened. I did learn that one of my co-workers knows the plaintiffs, and probably even attended the New Year’s Eve party when the trouble started. He had heard about “the stalker,” and how it had consumed their lives. I’m sure that if we had been offered the options of “guilty,” “not guilty,” or “crazy,” then we all would have chosen the third. It’s kind of a shame to see this guy being handled in the criminal justice system, but there are also very good reasons why we don’t deprive people of their freedom based on the say-so of mental health experts.
I reported as directed at the beginning of the afternoon on the appointed day. There was a lot of waiting around, and then finally the bailiff addressed us and showed us a short video. Then there were some questions and answers, and the dismissal of one or two unwilling idiots (“Is this gonna take all afternoon? ‘Cause I left my dog in my truck.”)
Then they took us to the courtroom where the players were assembled. The attorneys, a male prosecutor and a female defense attorney, were both white, middle aged, and sharply dressed. A plain-clothes officer sat with the prosecutor. The defendant did not look at all like a “criminal.” He was a trim white male whose age was given away mainly by his light gray hair. He followed the jury selection process intently -- sometimes even smiling -- and gave every impression of a man who fully expected to be exonerated.
The judge directed the process of jury selection, which took quite a long time. I thought it was a long shot that I would be selected. They had a large jury pool, and I’ve heard that lawyers on both sides do not like analytical-minded jurors (I'm an engineer). But after they had seated ten of the twelve jurors, my name was called.
They asked me some boilerplate questions. Then the defense attorney questioned me and committed the first of her many gaffes. She said, “If we were to send you to the jury chamber right now, what verdict would you return?” Without thinking too hard, I immediately replied “I couldn't possibly return a verdict now.” “Ah!” she retorted, “don’t you mean to say that you would have to find my client not guilty?” “Oh yeah, I guess I would,” I agreed. She was right, of course, but the whole ‘gotcha’ maneuver was very off-putting. I wondered how she could possibly think that it served the interests of her client. But after more questions, I was accepted as a juror.
After the twelfth juror was selected, we heard opening statements. It was a stalking case. The prosecutor told us that the defendant was stalking and harassing the plaintiffs, a married couple, and was causing them extreme distress and suffering. He said that the defendant would send dozens and dozens of bizarre letters, which were threatening and sexually inappropriate. He said that this was a long established pattern of behavior, and that we were going to hear testimony from previous victims as well.
The defense attorney, for her part, reminded us that the defendant was presumed innocent. She said that we shouldn’t be surprised if we heard very little from her or her client, because it was the prosecution that had to meet the burden of proof and do all the work. She portrayed the situation as a big misunderstanding, comparing it to someone who sends you unwanted e-mail jokes. She said the defendant kept sending these letters and everything because he was never told his attention was unwelcome.
Testimony began the next morning. The first witness was one of the defendant’s alleged previous victims. We were instructed that the defendant was not being tried for her case, and that the testimony was included only to establish a pattern of behavior. The woman was attractive, well-dressed, and apparently well-heeled. She had flown in from a thousand miles away for a single day just to testify. The prosecutor questioned her and painted a picture of the ordeal that she had suffered starting 25 years ago, and lasting over a decade. I detected a certain weariness, as though she had answered these questions 100 times before. She was serious, a bit nervous, and assiduously avoided looking in the direction of the defendant except very briefly when asked to identify him. She had known him briefly and dated him two or three times. Afterwards, he started sending her dozens, and eventually hundreds, of letters and postcards, and showing up in places where she was likely to be. She said she had always rejected his advances after those first few dates, but the letters kept coming even after she had moved to another state and married another man. The prosecutor read from some of the letters and showed one on the projector. The defendant would obsessively cram tiny little writing into every square millimeter of a postcard. The letters were rambling and bizarre. He would go on and on about his love for her, and about the imaginary children they supposedly had. Other letters were angry, and expressed his rage and frustration at not being able to be with her.
The second witness was another woman who had gone through a similar ordeal. She described how when she had moved (in part to escape him), he had taken to writing to her parents instead. The prosecutor read one of these letters wherein the defendant angrily insisted that he considered their daughter to be his wife, and demanded to know when she was finally going to grow up and come live with him. There were other incidents and hundreds of these letters, many of which the parents had saved. Like the first witness, the second victim had been stalked by this guy for more than ten years.
The defense attorney was true to her word, and did very little to rebut what seemed like incredibly damning testimony. She asked very few questions in cross examination, and never challenged the facts of the events, only their interpretation.
About then we broke for lunch. Over the course of the morning, it had become blatantly obvious that the defendant was rather profoundly disturbed. I was somewhat irritated that I was going to be asked to make a criminal judgment about someone who was plainly mentally ill.
After lunch we heard testimony from the actual plaintiff couple. First we heard from the woman. She explained how she had known the guy for a couple of years from pickup basketball. At one point she invited all of her gym acquaintances to a New Year’s Eve party, him included. Apparently, that was when he fixated on her. At first there were just a few awkward uninvited visits, but then the letters started arriving.
One burst of six communiqués in three days included a particularly disturbing post card that prompted them to call the cops. It was addressed to the husband. The defendant seemed to be angrily warning the husband not to get between him and the wife. He was very concerned about the imaginary child that he had had, or was going to have, with her. There were no direct threats as such, but there were evocations of violence, and the whole thing had a generally incoherent and agitated tone. It had phrases like, “Don’t do it Dan -- don’t kill our child.”
The couple began working with the officer -- a police detective -- who started uncovering things about the guy. The couple did not know where the defendant lived, only that he would visit or be seen lurking around in a red pickup truck. The letters had either a post office box return address or no postage at all, indicating they had been placed in the mailbox by hand. A baby’s shoe was also delivered like this. The prosecutor related how they had tracked down the vehicle registration, and then delivered one of his biggest bombshells: the defendant had actually registered his truck at the couple’s address. There was no other address for him, and no way to locate him. There were more letters and incidents, and then a few months later the defendant let it be known that he was going to attend a public slide show given by the husband. He did, and the cops picked him up there.
It turns out that the guy was homeless and had been living out of his truck for the last fifteen years. This was all the stranger because he was at least intermittently employed during this time, and he apparently had substantial inherited assets. He was actually quite a bright guy -- he had a graduate degree and several publications in a natural science field.
We came in the next day for final testimony and deliberations. The last item was a tape recording of the conversation between the detective and the defendant on the night he was arrested. The defendant waived his rights to have a lawyer present -- we heard that on the tape -- although it was a long and drawn out process before he said as much. The detective was quite professional and fair, and kept relating the facts of the case and asking the guy if just maybe he could see why people might have a problem with his behavior. The defendant strenuously denied that he could have done anything wrong. He insisted that he was very close to the plaintiffs, and that they had “invited him into their lives.” This went on for a while, with the defendant expressing ever more surprise and giving ever more convoluted explanations for why all these things he had been doing were completely ok. The most damning exchanges went something like this:
“Don’t you remember what happened with [victim 1] and [victim 2]? Can’t you see that you’re repeating the pattern of behavior that got you into so much trouble?”
“Yes, but that was their problem, not mine.”
And
“You do know that there’s not a real child involved here, don’t you?”
“(Irritated) Well of course I know THAT. But the important thing is that I’m completely COMMITTED to there being a child.”
We never heard the defendant speak except for on the tape, but he did react very emotionally to a lot of the testimony. At the end of the tape, he was almost at the point of tears. It was sad and pathetic, and you’d think he was reacting to having his fantasy world come crashing down around him. But considering how many times this had apparently happened before, he was probably just moving on to the next rationalization.
One thing that was conspicuously omitted was any explanation of what had happened in the previous cases. There obviously had been some sort of reckoning, but we had no idea whether he had been convicted, whether they had tried to treat him, or anything other than the oblique reference by the detective. It was also bizarre to be hearing all this and yet have no one, especially the defense attorney, willing to say out loud that the guy was crazy. During her closing arguments she continued her attempt to paint her client as just some poor misunderstood soul. She committed another gaffe when, noting that there were several technical professionals on the jury, she suggested that we might be the sorts of people who could understand what it was like to “march to a different drummer.” That one was really quite insulting.
The prosecutor’s closing argument basically reiterated the case he had been building up. He did quite a good job throughout the trial, and generally seemed to be the voice of reason. There were a couple times where I think he went a bit over the top -- one of the witnesses testified that the defendant wanted to run off with her and “live off the land,” and the prosecutor went on to suggest that she was extra terrified because he was, *gasp*, a hunter! The judge was a no-nonsense stand-up kind of guy, and the defense attorney seemed rather inapt by comparison. She made a final attempt to alienate the jury during the prosecutor’s closing argument. He said something to the effect that there might be some form of treatment available for the defendant if he were convicted, and she burst out interjecting, “That’s a lie! This is a felony charge, and they’re going to send him to prison!” The judge immediately ordered us to disregard this statement and have it stricken from the record. He said this with the sort of weary aplomb that suggested that this was exactly the sort of stunt he was used to from this particular attorney.
By the end of the testimony, I had pretty well overcome my reservations about convicting a mentally ill person. The problems he created and the persistence of his behavior really did seem to demand intervention. But we had not heard anything about the actual law(s) that he had allegedly broken, and I intended to apply the letter of the law to the best of my ability. Our briefing on the law came in the form of ten or so pages of jury instructions presented by the judge. He went over them one by one and discussed several points. Then we were sent to the jury room to deliberate.
I had no indication of the other jurors’ reactions. We had been instructed not to discuss the trial with each other, so until then all our interactions had been small talk. When we got to the jury room, nobody spoke for about half an hour. The jury was mostly white -- possibly with one or two Hispanics -- which would not represent an unusual draw in our community. There were six men and six women, with no particular tilt in any social characteristic as far as I could tell. We all silently pored over our jury instructions and examined the many letters and postcards that had been left with us as evidence.
I went through the instructions. Most of the items were incontrovertible boiler plate conditions that I don’t really remember. As for the defendant’s state of mind, we had only to find that he knowingly performed the actions that caused the harm, not that he knew such harm would be caused. In the end, the whole case turned on whether harm was suffered by the victims. I wish I could remember the exact phrase -- it was something like “excessive harm and suffering.” The judge had paid special attention to this phrasing during our instruction, and told us that there was no further legal elaboration of this standard. Our job was to determine whether the victims had suffered this, whatever it was.
There seemed to be no legal consideration for the defendant’s mental condition. In his defense, one could argue that most (though not quite all) of what constituted his supposed crime consisted simply in writing letters. The case we were trying was clearly less egregious than those of the previous victims. The current case had lasted less than a year, whereas the previous victims were each stalked for over a decade. In the current case, the couple had gone straight to the police and had never confronted the defendant to get him to stop. The defense attorney made a big deal of this. But the previous victims had both repeatedly rejected his advances to no avail. In the end it was very easy to sympathize with the victims. They had been living in a sort of state of siege where they avoided being seen outside, and they closed the curtains and turned off the lights in order to hide their presence in their own home. They kept a baseball bat by the door. It was obvious that having a disturbed stalker would cause an ordinary person to live in a state of fear, and one would be justified to avoid upsetting him. It seemed highly unlikely he would spontaneously change his conduct, though he might well move on to another victim. The guy had never actually been violent, and perhaps he never would have been. Even he still deserved the benefit of the doubt with regard to his intentions. When he was in a good mood, his rambling letters actually had something of a chivalrous tone as he expressed his devotion to the women and their imaginary families. But we were not asked to make a judgment about his capacity for violence, only whether harm had already been done.
I decided that if I had been in the position of the victims, and if I had gone through the entire ordeal only to see the guy walk, then I would have been outraged. I would be even more outraged if it turned out he had already walked before, which may well have been the case here. I would probably conclude that the state had broken its end of the social contract, and I might even begin to consider more extreme and less civil methods for taking my protection into my own hands. So I concluded that the experience of the couple rather clearly constituted “excessive harm and suffering,” and that the proper verdict was guilty. The only way I could come up with a “not guilty” would be to disregard the instructions and take a jury nullification stance. This case certainly did not warrant that.
By then, the other jurors had mostly emerged from their solitary deliberations. We selected a foreman and decided to take an anonymous straw poll to see where we stood. We were to decide on two counts, one for the wife and one for the husband. The woman next to me immediately wrote “guilty, guilty” on her slip of paper without bothering to hide her verdict. I wrote the same. We passed the slips to the foreman, and she read them aloud. “Guilty … guilty ...” it took a tense minute or two to go through all of them, but there were 24 guilties in a row. We were unanimous.
The serious mood in the room lifted instantly, and everybody started talking back and forth. The consensus seemed to be that you would have to be crazy to even consider a not guilty verdict. One guy -- “Thank god. I was afraid there would be that one flakey holdout, and we would be stuck here arguing all day.” I certainly expressed no reservations, for I had not come particularly close to the opposite judgment. At that point I suspect we were all just a bit relieved to avoid contentious deliberations. I’m sure other jurors had more nuanced opinions about the whole experience as well.
I had sort of expected that we would go through the instructions and justify our position, but there was really no point anymore. People talked on and on about how creepy the defendant was, and how arrogant the defense attorney had been. I looked through a bunch more letters and postcards and what I saw only confirmed our verdict. There was one particularly nasty profanity-laced postcard -- I don’t remember exactly what it said -- and he could be plenty scary even when he was in a good mood. (“It’s such a lovely day! Gosh I’d love to jump your bones!”)
Presently, we went back into the courtroom and delivered the verdict. The defense attorney expressed no emotion, and the defendant none other than to hang his head. The plaintiffs hugged silently. That was that.
Afterwards, the judge came into the jury room to meet the jurors. The first words out of his mouth were “Wasn’t that bizarre?!” He thanked us for our service, then chatted and answered questions for a few minutes. It sounded like this was a fairly extraordinary case even by the standards of his long tenure on the bench.
On the way out, several of us also got a chance to talk with the prosecutor and the detective. They said that in the previous cases the defendant had gotten at most a misdemeanor, with short sentences and counseling. At one point, his counselors had monitored him for a long time and thought he was under control. But the investigation in this new case had revealed that during this period he had actually been writing the letters to the parents of the second victim in another state. The prosecution had offered a plea bargain, but they felt that given the repeated offenses they needed at least one felony count in exchange for a reduced sentence and an agreement to submit to intrusive treatment. The defendant never acknowledged that there was anything wrong with his behavior, and resisted any effort to curtail his freedom.
The defense attorney apparently had no inclination to deal either. She seemed to have something of a reputation among the local legal community. I asked the prosecutor if there ever was a realistic chance of acquitting this guy, and he said that you never know what will happen with a jury. Sometimes, you get someone who won’t convict no matter what the evidence, especially in a liberal college town like ours. It strikes me now that while people like that think they’re making a brave social statement, they are also making the justice system capricious and unpredictable. The unintended consequence here was a lawyer and client willing to gamble with the latter’s freedom.
The sentencing was scheduled for two months later, and I never did find out what happened. I did learn that one of my co-workers knows the plaintiffs, and probably even attended the New Year’s Eve party when the trouble started. He had heard about “the stalker,” and how it had consumed their lives. I’m sure that if we had been offered the options of “guilty,” “not guilty,” or “crazy,” then we all would have chosen the third. It’s kind of a shame to see this guy being handled in the criminal justice system, but there are also very good reasons why we don’t deprive people of their freedom based on the say-so of mental health experts.