Jury Duty

Well. It’s over.

I’m not sure how judges do it, day in and day out. But I, with 11 of my peers, sent a 23 year old black male to prison today.

He will serve somewhere between 10 and 50 years for a stupid decision he made at 20 years of age. A decision he made while afraid and in a panic. An act that took most likely no more than 8 seconds to complete. An act where no one was even hurt or injured.

I’m sad for this young man and his family. Really, truly and honestly heartbroken. My stomach hurts from it. I want to cry and when I’m done crying I want to forget I ever saw his face or heard his name. That this civic duty I was legally compelled to take part in never happened. That this burden was someone else’s. I want to take it all back. I want to erase what I did today and what he did two and a half years ago.

I wanted nothing more than to ignore the evidence, to ignore the testimony, to ignore it all and just say that nothing happened. That he shot the gun straight up in the air like a starter pistol. But I can’t believe that. Witnesses denied that. The evidence did not point to that. Nothing did. This case sucked all around. It was murky and convoluted.

Why isn’t there some middle ground between guilty and not guilty? Yes he did it, yes he made a bad decision, but no one got hurt. He was scared and in fear for his life. But because no weapon was drawn on him, he can’t claim self defense. And here we are. And there he is.

What is effectively left of his young life is going to sit in prison for somewhere between 10 and 50 years. And what comes out on the other side? Not him. Not that man I saw today. I close my eyes and I see him. His face, how he sat. No one deserves that sentence for the way this particular crime was perpetrated.

I prayed for the first time in years tonight for him and his family and that what happened today was the right decision. God, I hope it was.

I never want to do this again. Never.

Fuck it all.

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