Intuition accounted for a lot of the reason I was so strongly unwilling to convict. I didn’t, and still don’t, find it implausible that he was guilty. I simply feel that his story was equally plausible, and furthermore, while the cop’s testimony was murky and confused, DH seemed very genuine in his recorded interview. Yes, I know some people are good at lying. Yes, I know he had motivation to lie and had time to figure out what to say. But my intuition told me he was not prevaricating, and as an INFJ, I have learned to trust my intuition, which is usually correct, even if I can’t totally explain why. If there had been stronger evidence to prove that he was guilty, certainly I would have trusted that over my intuition. But given that the case was based almost solely on circumstantial evidence, I don’t think the prosecution adequately proved his guilt, in my mind, beyond a reasonable doubt. I still had a pretty big doubt.
Anyway, after much discussion, we voted again and it came out 3-9 in favor of a Guilty Verdict. We then talked a lot more and ultimately decided we were not going to be able to make a unanimous decision. So we sent a note to the judge informing him of this. Before we received his response, however, we had a lunch break. Lunch consisted of all of us walking across the street, accompanied by two bailiffs, eating at a fancy buffet at the St Paul Hotel (on the state), and then walking back with the bailiffs to the deliberation room. After that, we all traipsed back into the courtroom, at which point the judge informed us that he would like us to deliberate further.
Back to the jury room we went. We discussed for quite awhile longer, and then came to the same conclusion: no unanimous decision possible. So we sent another note to the judge. But before we received his response, a few people decided they wanted to listen to the defendant’s recorded interview again even though we had already discussed that option several times and no one, at that point, had felt it was necessary). So after waiting for quite a while, the judge summoned us back to the courtroom, and said he had received two notes from us. He read the first one out loud, and then the second once, in which we asked to review the tape of the recorded interview. He said, “I assume, then, that the second note supercedes the first.” Yes.
So the court clerk passed out transcripts of the recorded interview while the state attorney got the tape read to play. Naturally, when we got the transcripts, we all started flipping through them to check certain statements we were unsure about. All of a sudden we heard, from the prosecuting attorney, “Your Honor, the jury is reading the transcripts….” Tattle tale! The judge asked us to please stop reading until the tape was played. At that point, we were all so tired and loopy that some of us had to hold in laughter. It was just funny, I don’t know. Then the cord fell out of the tape player, which was also funny.
Adventures of an Introvert 