Jury duty - in a BIG way!
I got a notice to show up for jury duty. I showed up at the scheduled time last week and was told to show up outside of a certain court on Monday. There were 49 other people who showed up and attorneys for both sides started asking questions to come up with twelve honest people to sit in that jury box
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His defense:
He came home and walked into the bedroom. She was waiting for him with a small knife and stabbed him. He grabbed a hammer that was in the room and swung it around. He got out of the room and closed the door behind him but she was following closely. They fought ferociously in the kitchen. There was a plastic container of gasoline under the sink, so he grabbed it and tried to hit her with it. Finally, he grabbed a large from the stovetop and stabbed her in the chest, damaging a lung and her heart. The small knife was found on the kitchen floor near her body with his blood on it. He did indeed have a serious wound.
He struggled to his sister’s house a few blocks away and collapsed. He spent three days unconscious in the hospital and was arrested when he woke up.
The law allows the use of deadly force if a person can’t possibly avoid being the victim of deadly force from another. However, if a person can get out of the situation without using deadly force, then there can be no justification for using it.
These are the biggest things that tripped him up in court:
There was a huge quantity of blood on the bed. Her head showed six blows from the hammer, two of them hard enough to fracture her skull. It was unlikely she could have put up much of a fight after that and we thought he probably could have gotten out. Still, the law says he gets the benefit of the doubt.
Next, two witnesses saw him in the kitchen holding her by the hair. One was an adult male houseguest who says the defendant was pouring gasoline on the victim and claiming he was going to burn the house down. Another witness was a nine-year-old daughter of the victim. The girl claims the defendant was pressing the victim’s head against the wall. If he had control of her there, he probably could have gotten out. It was just his word against the witnesses’ and again, he gets the benefit of the doubt.
What we had no answer for was the location of one single piece of evidence. The hammer, with her blood and hair on it, was on a sofa near the front door. He didn’t remember how it got there. There would have been lots of her blood in the living room, just like there was in the bedroom and kitchen, if she was still coming after him with a knife. We figured he would have dropped the hammer in the bedroom or in the kitchen. If it was in the bedroom, kitchen or anywhere along that path, there may have been some reasonable doubt.
I'm going to try to write a story about the incident. It won't take much embellishment to make it interesting.
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Interesting but sad story.
The only time I got close to trial was: we had been picked and were waiting to go into the courtroom when the guy decided to change his plea to guilty. He was up for child molestation.
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