A Jury to Decide (Part 1)
A Jury to Decide (Part 2)
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After having heard the testimonies, the judge instructed us on our procedure. We were given a packet with definitions of each of the 4 counts with which Mr. Jensen was charged as well as definitions of some of the jargon that made its way into the law dealing with each of the 4 counts. We were to use our own common sense as well as the word of the law to come to a unanimous conclusion on each of the 4 counts. Each of the 4 counts was a separate entity and must be decided upon based on the evidence that supported or discounted the definition of the specific charge. We were not to consider the consequences of a guilty charge, but merely determine whether or not the prosecution had enough evidence to prove that Mr. Jensen was clearly guilty. If we had any questions, we could write them onto a piece of paper, hand it to the bailiff, and a response would be given (as it turned out, the judge was not very helpful in providing responses. He believes, and probably correctly, that the best and most honest jury decisions can be made without any interaction with the judge. So, except for one yes or no question related to a piece of testimony that may have been stricken, all of our other questions were responded to with a note that told us to refer to our notes and other pieces of evidence. Still, it was annoying...)
Thirteen jurors had stayed through the entire trial in case one of us had an emergency and had to be excused from jury duty. This was not the case however so the extra juror was excused and the rest of us were dismissed into the jury room to begin deliberating. We elected a jury foreman (who was one of the 3 men selected for this trial) and then initiated our deliberations with a vote of guilty, not guilty, or reserved for each of the four counts.
Note: from this moment forward, I will refer to the foreman as the foreman, myself as myself/juror 12, and the rest of the jury members as 2-11.
The initial vote was all over the board. The majority of the jury seemed convinced that he was guilty of something and there were a bunch of tally marks in the reserved section. While there were a couple of not guilty votes in each of the various accounts, there was only one juror who voted not guilty for all. Clearly there were some discussions that needed to take place.
For the sake of ease, I will assign the guilty-on-all-accounts to jurors 2-7. We began our discussion by asking them to state their positions. These jurors had to be convinced beyond all reasonable doubt that Mr. Jensen was guilty and so we needed to hear how they had interpreted the evidence and analyze the assumptions they had made before continuing. They drew a lot from Ms. Smith's testimony including her demeanor as she was giving her testimony. They were persuaded by her tears and her story, by the pictures of her bruised and cut feet and legs, by her eye contact with the jury as though she were pleading for help. They also thought a lot of Mr. Jensen's story didn't add up. Immediately following his sexual activity with Ms. Smith, which no one was denying, he had committed some very suspicious activity and his explanations were not, they felt, satisfactory. The evidence provided by the DNA expert showed too much of Ms. Smith's DNA on Mr. Jensen's knife for simply picking it up and putting it back down and so the knife "must" have been out more often than Mr. Jensen let on in his testimony. This would beg two questions: 1) why would a knife have been out during consensual sex and 2) why would Fred Jensen lie about it? This was their explanation for their guilty verdicts on the counts of use of a deadly weapon to commit a felony and sexual assault. They then claimed that if the sex was not consensual, that the transportation between locations constituted as kidnapping and the use of terroristic threats was the only way that he was able to get her back into the car time after time.
This drew a lot of reflection and, from the physical evidence that we were allowed to have in the room, we found the pictures of Katie Smith's hospital visit and examined up close how badly cut her feet and legs were. We found the DNA report from the crime lab and looked much more closely at the amounts of DNA present on various pieces of evidence, including Ms. Smith's clothing and Mr. Jensen's knife. Several jurors changed their votes from reserved to guilty and from not guilty to reserved. I myself, who had voted reserved for everything, did not change any of my votes. I had not spoken at all during this time because, as much as I wanted to convict Fred Jensen of everything, I realized that my judgement may be very clouded due to the nature of the subject. It was very difficult for me to separate my hatred of rapists from my humanism and, more often than I would like to admit, I caught myself dehumanizing Mr. Jensen instead of honestly evaluating Ms. Smith's story. And so I waited.
We then asked the room in general if the juror who had voted not guilty on all counts would feel comfortable discussing and explaining her side of the story. She, whom I will refer to as juror 11, came forward and admitted that she felt that Ms. Smith's story seemed strained and forced, more like a performance than an honest confession. While she didn't like the idea of what was being discussed and said that if the allegations could be proved to her to be true then she would have no hesitation in convicting Mr. Jensen, Juror 11 said that she was not convinced that there was enough validity in the prosecution's case to make her vote guilty without a reasonable doubt on any of the charges.
This naturally caused some friction and the foreman suggested that we take each of the charges and break them down individually. I am proud to say that I was way ahead of them at this step in the game. I had been flipping back and forth between the charges, the definitions, and my notes, trying to convince myself that what I felt in my gut was the truth. At this point, juror number 10, a short bald man from a very rural area, got the jury's attention, turned to me, and said, "What do you think?" I'll be honest, it was kind of amazing that someone cared about what input I had. I realize that I was one of twelve, but still. As the entire group quieted, I thought very hard because I needed myself to come off as objective and rational, so I answered with a question. "Fred Jensen admitted that the knife was in his car. When Katie picked up the knife, that's how he said her DNA got on it. Assuming that one of the other felonies had been committed, and this is in no way saying that there was, and also assuming that Fred Jensen's testimony was right about the knife simply being in the car, does the knife's mere presence at the time of these crimes qualify it as being used to commit the felony?" According to the law, the definition of use including the demonstration, possession, or visual appearance at any time before, during, or after the felony was committed. But whether the knife simply being within sight in a car console constituted as possession and appearance caused me to pause. Upon further discussion, everyone unanimously agreed that, if one of the other felonies could be proven, then the knife's mere presence would qualify as the use of the deadly weapon to commit said felony. And, if the knife's presence was enough to qualify as the use of a deadly weapon to commit a felony and Ms. Smith was frightened by the deadly weapon, as she had stated multiple times in her testimony, then the knife and the threat of Mr. Jensen using the knife would be enough to constitute a guilty verdict on the charge of terroristic threats.
By the time we had gotten this far, it was past time for the court to close and we were allowed to go home with the continuation of the solemn oath to not talk about the trial and especially deliberations with anyone until the trial was through. This is important because of what happened when we came back the next day.
I arrived in the morning and, after a time we were ushered into the court room instead of the jury room. The judge said that, before we began deliberations that morning, that he and the lawyers needed to talk to several of us and that deliberations were to be postponed until further notice. Then all of us except for juror 2 were sent back to the jury room to chat until the judge either called the next juror or told us that we could resume deliberations. One by one, jurors were called to the court room to speak with the judge and the lawyers only to be sent back with the name of another juror to call to the court room. I was called and I made my way to the room and sat in the jury box. The judge began by asking me some questions about the oath we had taken. I told him that I had not spoken to anyone about the case. My family, my father especially because he's a lawyer who know the judge who presided over this case, had asked how it was going, and people had talked about saving the newspaper articles for me to read afterwards, but I had neither received nor searched for information regarding the trial outside of what I heard in court. The judge then asked me about conversations in the jury room and at lunch, about whether I had remembered hearing anyone talking about sharing the trial with outside parties. I told him that I didn't remember anything specific. We had had short conversation a couple of times about how funny it was when our neighbors came up to us saying that they saw about the trial in the paper and that they'd save clippings for us, but that, as far as I knew, we had all kept our oaths. The judge then opened up the questions to the lawyers and, while Mr. Mills had nothing to ask, Mr. Paulsen questioned me specifically about juror 11. He asked such things about whether I'd heard her say that she had confided in her husband about the trial. I said that I had not and then I was dismissed with the name of another juror to call to the courtroom.
It was close to lunch time when they called us all back into the court room. The judge apologized for calling us all in. He'd originally thought that he'd only needed to speak to a few. He told us that we could resume deliberations after lunch and then he dismissed us. During lunch, we tried to figure out what had happened and none of us knew exactly. After the trial, we found out that juror 11 had been accused of breaking her oath and divulging secrets to her husband and so Mr. Paulsen motioned for a mistrial. After receiving our testimonies, however, the judge denied the motion. Still...it was strange to be both a member of the jury and a witness at the same time. I felt strange as I realized that much of the discussion of witness unreliability was evident in my testimony of the happenings within the jury room. I was put in the unique position of experiencing the same skepticism of my credibility as I was putting on the credibility of each of the witnesses in the trial. To say that it was eye-opening would be an understatement. I finally realized that the true evaluation of a testimony is not entirely a measure of the chronological and sensible nature of the facts, but a measure of the significance of the inconsistencies. In other words, does one's demeanor match up with one's story? How many times does this person have to back track? If the same question is asked in a different way, how will the two responses match up?
After lunch, we resumed the discussion of the two hot-button topics: kidnapping and sexual assault. After a night of restless contemplation, I was more convinced than ever that Mr. Jensen was guilty of all charges and, because juror 11 did not value Ms. Smith's argument, I used the evidence in Mr. Jensen's own testimony against him. It came up more than once that it appeared as though Ms. Smith had indeed made plans for hooking up with Mr. Jensen later but Mr. Jensen convinced her to leave and go with him sooner. She was without shoes in the middle of October. There were no explanations as to why they had had to have sex outside Mr. Jensen's car, as to why she had had to walk barefoot to those remote locations. Based on our assumptions of her character, we also assumed with reasonable certainty that she would not agree to performing oral sex after anal sex, that she would simply neglect to lie to her boyfriend and friends about where she was going to make sure that they wouldn't find out about what might have otherwise been construed as an affair. In regards to her kidnapping, even if she had left her apartment willingly, there was a moment in Fred Jensen's testimony where he admitted to turning down a road leading away from her home, claiming that he wanted to go the long way back so that they could talk about what her story was going to be. Mr. Jensen admitted that Katie had told him to stop the car, to take her back to her place, and that he had said no and gone ahead with his plan to "go the long way around". Suddenly, Katie is in his car against her will, going in a direction that was unplanned and unwarranted. This, by the law's definition, was kidnapping.
Slowly, the rest of the reserved voters changed their votes to guilty and juror 11 was finally convinced. We had convicted him on all four counts. It was over.
We were summoned back to the court room and the foreman handed the bailiff our unanimous decision, which was read in front of Mr. Jensen. As I saw the look in his face, I was reminded that, no matter how this case would have turned out, one person's life was going to be ruined. Fred Jensen began to cry and, though my conviction behind our decision never wavered, I felt my heart twinge as I remembered that he had a wife and kids, that he would be in jail for a very long time, and that I am partly responsible, even in the mere execution of my duty, for tearing this family apart. It only got worse as each of our last names were read and we were asked to verify that the conviction fairly and accurately represented my views on the matter. I had to say yes and watch him hang his head and sob. It was one of the hardest things I've ever had to sit through. Sure, you can say that he deserved it, but it's different saying that about someone and saying that to someone. It is so remarkably, heart-wrenchingly different.
We were finally allowed to leave the court room and the sobbing Fred Jensen and return to the jury deliberation room. The judge came back and spoke to us about our decision and the process that would take place now that he had received a guilty verdict. The pit in my stomach grew as the judge informed us of the penalties for each crime. Terroristic threats could get 5-20 years in jail. Kidnapping and 1st degree sexual assault both ranged from 10-50 years. Use of a deadly weapon could get 1-5 years, but it was the only charge that could be served simultaneously with another charge. All of the others were separate, consecutive penalties. I had just condemned a man to a minimum of 25 years in jail, by which time his kids would be grown and independent. I must say that I did not feel pity for Fred Jensen, but for his family who would be torn apart by his actions and our judgement of his actions.
The judge went on to say that the case would be appealed, but appellate courts make decisions based on the assumption that the evidence was there for the defendant to be convicted; a guilty until proven innocent system, if you will. After that, he asked if we had had any questions and then dismissed us all. Our jury duty had been fulfilled and we were free to go home.
This was one of the hardest, most rewarding experiences I had ever had. I had a major headache and fatigue everyday after coming home from the stress. So rarely does one have such power over the lives of complete strangers. I am grateful for having such a great jury that valued my opinion and encouraged open discussion without fear of judgement. The judicial system is a complex system of varying levels and it relies heavily on the participation and integrity of each and every individual who takes part in it. It is a system that deserves wary respect, the kind that you give an overworked and stressed out mother (I love you, Mommy, but sometimes you scare me). I hope you all have this experience once. What it lacks in luster and amusement, it makes up for ten-fold in wisdom gained and the gratification that comes with accomplishing something unique and important.
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I hope that you found at least some of this insight helpful. I am a firm believer in being politically informed, if not active. We make the world of tomorrow and it doesn't happen overnight.
