I guess that I can talk about it now since I have been released from Jury Duty.OneGun wrote:So, what kind of case was it? Do you know?allisji wrote:So I reported to court this morning, however my jury service ended rather unceremoniously.
All 13 jurors showed up this morning at 10:00AM, however, two of them disclosed to the judge that they have conflicts and asked to be removed from the panel.
Down to 11 jurors, the judge decided to dismiss the jury and start over with a new one.
Nothing goes according to plan.
What we learned during jury selection was that it was a 2nd degree felony case of cocaine possession (4-200 g) and the defendant is a young black man. The prosecution and defense both talked about what is required to constitute possession. So I was assuming that the case might hinge on whether he "knowingly" possessed it, or whether it was physically on his person. Both sides were interested in finding whether or not anyone in the jury was biased about police officers.
I was interested to find out how many grams of cocaine had been recovered for evidence since 4-200 is a large range. I would think if the quantity were on the lower end that the defense might try to argue that the defendant possessed less than 4 grams (of course if they were planning to go that route I would guess that they'd have reached a plea deal a long time ago).
The penalty range was 2-20 years, but the defense had requested that if found guilty they wanted the court to decide the sentence and not the jury. Perhaps the judge might be more sympathetic than the jury? The judge also was interested in making sure that no one on the jury would assume that if the defendant chose not to testify on his own behalf that it was evidence of his guilt, which I assume is probably a normal reminder from the judge, but I was curious if it meant that the defendant had already decided not to testify.