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Friday, December 07, 2001
Jury duty
December 7, 2001. My first experience serving on a jury! It was a DUII (drunk driving) case. There were six jurors, and a unanimous vote was required. Note to the young female defense attorney: Next time you get a client who can put on an act like this guy did, get copies of his medical records if he was actually "crippled" enough to fail the tests given by the police! The defandant's claim that he had been to lots of doctors but had burned his medical records was not credible at all; in our present lawsuit-crazy society, I can assure you that any doctors he went to would have their own copies of his medical records. He put on a good act in the courtroom (walking with great difficulty, slow speech, etc.), which was enough to make us feel sympathy for him, but there wasn't a shred of credible evidence beyond what he did and said to convince us that his injuries were real. I have obtained copies of my own medical records; it wasn't difficult at all. With such easy-to-obtain evidence, we might well have voted in his favor. Instead, after deliberating for only about half an hour, we delivered a verdict of Guilty to the judge, who thanked us for our service and dismissed us, without telling us what would happen to the defandant. Our job was simply to decide whether he was innocent or not; punishment was not our concern... By the way, this guy had refused to take the breath test (after failing the standard coordination tests), which (in Oregon, at least) results in suspension of your driver's license. He also forgot to limp outside the courtroom, but our instructions were to decide the case on the evidence presented inside the courtroom...