• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 645 0

way: In this case we needed jurors who cared about what goes on in the world and were willing to do something about it. Not necessarily activists who go out and protest, but people who would give a damn about what happened to a little girl. We needed jurors of intelligence who could comprehend the evidence we were going to be giving them—not just the scientific evidence, but the evidence as a whole. No one was going to give them this case on a silver platter; we didn’t have the evidence to serve anything up nice and easy. The jurors were going to have to put the pieces together and apply some commonsense understanding of how people act and don’t act. It wouldn’t require a formal education, but it would take intelligence. Last, we needed jurors who believed in following the law and were willing to take on the responsibility of making important decisions.

The difficulty we found was that the people who cared about what was going on in the world around them were the very people who had watched the case in the media. And because they were moved by what had happened to Caylee, they’d followed it even more. As intelligent people who’d listened to the evidence as it had been revealed in the media, they’d followed that evidence to its logical conclusion. As people who believed in the law, they were honest about their previously formed conclusions when they were asked about them. The end result was that anyone who would see the evidence the way we wanted them to had already seen the evidence and drawn the conclusions we drew. Those conclusions reflected the attitude in the court of public opinion, but in the real court they had to be disqualified.

In the end, it took us eleven days to get the jury selected. We struck down many, and the defense did as well. When all was said and done, the jury was made up of five men and seven women, with one African-American woman and one African-American man. Their backgrounds were as follows:

JUROR 1: An older woman who was married, as I recall. She had been trained and worked as a nurse for many years, but now she was in retirement, working as a counselor. She seemed nice, but not a take-charge kind of person. When it comes to juries, older folks tend to be judgmental, but people involved in counseling generally are not, so that combination made her hard to read. She had no major minuses for us, but gave us no great enthusiasm.

JUROR 2: An African-American gentleman who I believe had heard about the case and candidly admitted that he thought Casey was guilty. However, he said he could keep an open mind. I liked him. He seemed levelheaded. I didn’t think he’d be the foreman, but I thought he’d listen to us. I was surprised the defense didn’t strike him after his admission that he believed Casey guilty.

JUROR 3: Jennifer Ford. I use her name because she has been interviewed publicly since the trial. A nursing student in her thirties, Jennifer appeared to be starting her career a little late, so I sensed that she had a change of career path at some point. Working and going to school is tough, so I thought she would judge Casey’s apparent laziness harshly. I don’t recall that she had kids, which was a minus in my mind. The way I remember it, Frank didn’t care for her, saying he didn’t like her attitude. I guess his instincts were good after all.

JUROR 4: An African-American woman in her forties. One of the first things she volunteered was that she didn’t feel she could judge other people. Usually when someone brings something like that up, it’s a sure sign that they either really mean it or just don’t want to be there. Later she would modify that somewhat to claim that she thought she could serve in spite of that belief. We tried to strike her, but the defense objected, claiming we were striking her based on her race. I thought it was an obvious call, since by her own admission she was going to have trouble judging anyone and judgment is the sole purpose of the jury. My jaw dropped when Judge Perry wouldn’t let us excuse her. I thought that legally we were acting reasonably and within