Juries and evidence

In Florida, if you are selected for jury duty and actually show up, you are not selectable for another year. I have been called to jury duty twice in the past four years. The first was in November of 2008, and I sat in the jury holding until noon, and was then told I wasn't needed and sent home. The second was in July of 2010. The clerk sent out 200 summons, and only 110 actually bothered to show up. Fourteen made it to the jury.

This is brought to mind when I read the article about how people are protesting that a cop was found not guilty of beating a burglary suspect in Houston. Now, I am certainly not above slamming cops when they are wrong, and this may well have been the case here, I don't know. What I DO know is that the jury listened to all of the facts in the case, and returned a verdict of not guilty. That is it, as far as I am concerned.

There are people who claim that the jury was biased, because they were all white, and others in comments are claiming that the reason for this, is that the jury was constituted in the south. I have a number of problems with this:

1    It is racist to claim that white juries can't reach a decision based on the facts.

2   The jury pool is randomly selected from the general population of Houston. The population of Houston is 49% white, 25% black, and 5% Asian. The jury pool should have had a similar makeup. With all of that, only 2 blacks bothered to respond to the jury summons. That means that black people who received a summons were overwhelmingly unlikely to show up, probably due to apathy.

3   It could be that he was acquitted because of the actual evidence. The cop was accused of kicking the teen on the left side of his head, but photos presented at trial showed the teen's injuries were on the right side of his head. That may have been the reason.

4   Then the article talks about the Travon Martin case, even though it is completely irrelevant. This case was about a beating that allegedly took place with cops as the perpetrators, and the Martin shooting was a Hispanic citizen shooting of a black teen. Where is the relevance? This is about the press doing what it can to increase dissatisfaction on the part of black citizens.

A suspicious, conspiracy theory minded individual would begin to suspect that this is being done by the MSM to fire up apathetic black voters and inspire them to go to the polls. You see, this voting block voted 80% for Obama in 2008, and unless they show up to the polls in large numbers in November, Obama will lose the Whitehouse, because he is losing the swing voters.

Too many times, we hear about 'all white juries' when a decision doesn't go the way that the black community wants it to go. I got news for ya: Juries do this all the time. They hand down verdicts that don't always go the way that you would think they would, but they see ALL of the evidence, not just the part that the press manipulates. Try to remember that. Not everything that doesn't go your way is racism.