Jury duty in Houston tomorrow

[Vol Texan]

I hope I get picked one day. The government doesn't trust me to carry as a juror, so I don't trust the testimony of anybody who carries as a witness. ...

The sides in a civil trial can become quite heated, and in a criminal trial you have, quite possibly, a very violent person on trial for (fill in the blank).

I would not want to take the chance of anyone getting out of control in those very tight confines.

No, the only people who need to be armed in the courtroom is the bailiff and the judge.

I agree, but there should be an option for those of us who do carry to safely and securely store our firearms as we enter the secured area. Back in Tennessee, when we were bringing in an arrested person to the jail, we parked the car inside the sally port, walked the prisoner into a secured entry room, checked our handguns in a secure locker (and we kept the key), and then entered with the prisoner. The entry room was monitored by camera and a live person 24/7.

This was 20+ years ago, I'm sure the security of these setups are better now than they were back in the day. Why can't we have them in modern courthouses (and other government-required gun-free zones)?

Sorry to digress...I look forward to hearing a report on how the trial went. I've shown up many times, but never have been selected for a jury yet.

[allisji]

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.

[OneGun]

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.

So, what kind of case was it? Do you know?

[allisji]

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.

So, what kind of case was it? Do you know?

I guess that I can talk about it now since I have been released from Jury Duty.

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.