The Verdict is In

After sitting through a day and a half of jury selection, four and a half days of trial, and two full days of deliberations, my jury in the New York State Supreme Court found Simeon Tlaplanco-Reyes guilty of second-degree assault for stabbing Filiberto Galindo on West 36th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues on July 17, 2003. We found Jose Luiz de los Santos not guilty on all counts.

We were given a mass of contradictory evidence and eyewitness accounts and asked to decide whether it was proven that the defendants got into a drunken fight with Galindo in the garment district that culminated in Tlapanco-Reyes stabbing Galindo twice in the back while de los Santos blocked Galindo from fleeing. There were only four eyewitnesses -- the defendants, the stabbing victim, and an occasional friend to the defendants.

And here's the conventional wisdom I have to reiterate to defense attorneys: don't let your clients testify. Sometimes a messy case is just chaos and you don't know who to believe and you get a mistrial or acquittal because the state didn't prove its case. But other times, when you have more evidence, you can see the patterns in a messy case because so much contradictory testimony agrees on certain key points.

To put it simply: if the defendants didn't testify, I would've acquitted both of them. There was only one eyewitness (the victim) and his testimony was simply unbelievable by itself. But the defendants testified, and now one of them is going to jail for it.

The judge advised us not to talk about the case during the trial, and I would think to myself, "That's ok -- I'm going to blog the hell out of it afterwards!" But now, over a week later, I find myself unable to either be flip about it, or to write the long examination required to explain where all the testimony agrees, where it diverges, and who is believable where. I guess that's why they have a trial, right?

But, since this trial occupied over a week of my life and kept me sleepless and boring to talk to, I feel compelled to offer a few observations:

1. The system works pretty damned well. When we initially broke for deliberations, we were evenly divided -- six jurors for guilty and six to acquit. I believed we were a hung jury and that there was no way we'd reach a consensus. Some people didn't think there was enough evidence; we had testimony read back and then they reconsidered. Some people thought that their doubt was reasonable, but after talking through the evidence their doubt became unreasonable. In the end we came to a consensus about a pretty confusing case with very little physical evidence.

2. Legalism doesn't reign in the courtroom. Judge Rena Uviller kept the trial moving. She frequently chastised the ADA for repeating testimony over and over again. The ADA would frequently ask questions in the most convoluted language possible and Uviller would say something like "Come on -- just use the common language!" Uviller was genuinely interested in the spirit of the law and wanted the stories told as best as they could be in order for us to make our decision as clearly as possible.

3. Why are there four bailiffs in one courtroom? One day, one of the bailiffs spent the entire day sleeping. Another day one of the bailiffs was reading a book masked behind his legal guide. There was a bailiff in the front to hand evidence and water to the witness. There was a bailiff in the back whose sole purpose seemed to be to call in a new witness. There's a bailiff to lead jurors in, and to lead jurors out. We should've at least had a bailiff for massage.

4. My favorite quotes. We'd encounter the army of photographers, video crews, and reporters awaiting news from the Tyco trial going on in the same courthouse, and one day an alternate juror said to me "Look at them, waiting to pounce like wolves." I said "I work with those people," to which he said "Nothing personal."

One juror didn't believe the victim's testimony that he didn't actually feel it when he got stabbed. To which another juror, a grizzled old black man fond of wearing neon orange vests, replied "I got stabbed three times and I didn't even know it."

Another juror, a middle-aged Upper West Side woman who wore a tasteful turtleneck every day of the trial, couldn't believe the victim's testimony because his lifestyle just didn't make sense. "I can't believe he'd have an appointment to meet a friend at 8pm and miss it," she said at one point.

One juror debated whether stabbing someone twice in the back constitutes purposely hurting someone. He said that you could stab someone in order to protect your friend, and this wouldn't necessarily mean you're trying to hurt the person. "It's like the police," he said. "They're not trying to hurt -- they're trying to protect." To which I launched into a long diatribe about the social contract and the evils of vigilante justice, and how while we give police that power we do not give that power to roving bands of drunken thugs.

And finally, my favorite quotes -- about me. One the second day of deliberations, after I'd been chosen to present the case for conviction, a juror who had been for acquittal said "That makes sense. You should've presented the case instead of the District Attorney." Another formerly-for-acquittal juror concurred.

And then, after we had a verdict and were waiting to go into the courtroom, a different juror said "Your help was instrumental." Hooray for justice!