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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (52894)	7/5/2004 6:36:24 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 793622

Did you try to get the Jury to nullify? No. Not exactly. It was an interesting problem because most of the potential jurors who might have been so inclined weren't on the jury because they told the judge they could never convict. There were at least seven or eight guys who got out of it that way. I discussed it with one afterwards--gave him hell for bailing--but he said he used prostitutes so there was no way. Apparently he had some unusual tastes. We didn't discuss the details. <g> We voted to convict on sodomy and prostitution. Undercover cops (who did not look like normal people) had placed an add for women to pose for pictures so they had proof of guilt. Where it got interesting was that, in Virginia, the jury sets the penalty. The maximum penalty for prostitution is a year and for sodomy five years. This was my very first brush with the social conservative mindset. Most of the jury would have given her the death penalty had that been allowed. The woman was from West Virginia--a stereotype of Appalachia--tired and worn and old looking with snaggle teeth and stringy hair and pale skin. I'd be surprised if her IQ were more than seventy. The kicker in this case was that the other woman was her daughter, who was apparently the ring-leader but she must have taken a plea bargain because she testified against her mother. But the mother/daughter thing really disgusted the jury. Anyway, it was all the rest of us could do to cut the maximum sentence in half, best I recall. What do jurors know about reasonable sentences? All I knew was from Night Court on TV where the typical penalty was ten days. There were only four of us who wouldn't go for the max and one wouldn't even go for less than six months because the woman had already been in jail for six months and he didn't want to embarrass the prosecution by calling for a sentence of less than that. I can't tell you how traumatic this was for me. I still feel queasy when I think about it. I spent long hours considering standing my ground but decided in the end that that was too arrogant so I dickered instead. Still don't know if that was the right thing to do. Still bothers me. Anyway, that's what triggered my first recognition that everybody wasn't like my crowd and stimulated my ongoing practice of exposing myself to people whose world views are alien to me. It's also where I found out how broad the definition of sodomy is and that practically everyone in Virginia probably has committed it. It's also what made me realize that I would never test the justice system.