I served on my first jury ever this week.
Selection took all day Monday, trial was most of Tuesday and Wednesday, and this morning was closing arguments and deliberation. It was a criminal case. I live about a mile from Richmond, CA, which has a pretty bad reputation in some neighborhoods, as you may know. We sat for a minor case, a misdemeanor charge of "delaying, obstructing, or resisting" a peace officer.
The defendant was a young woman who lives across the street from a house that the Richmond police raided for drugs and weapons. She's friends with the young man because they both have a pair of pit bulls. It's that kind of a neighborhood.
The prosecutor called his first and only witness, the arresting detective. His story was that they had a search warrant to raid the house where the young man deals drugs from the porch. They went in force: two police cars, a raid van, and animal control, maybe 12 men total. The woman saw them coming and yelled "Rollers!", which alerted the man, who ran into his house, giving him a 30-second head start, "delaying" their raid. They used "the key" to get in (it's a battering ram), and the defendant was returning from the bathroom.
Then, while four cops dragged the man (big: 6-3, 275) and three others outside to the front yard, she was a constant yelling and physical presence to be dealt with, "obstructing" their mission. Finally, after he'd had enough and she was told to "come here" (because he intended to arrest her), she "fled" to her yard and taunted the cop with her dogs, "resisting" the peace officer.
He reached over the fence, and one pit bull bit his sleeve. He drew his gun at the dogs, and with the other hand pulled her over the fence and arrested her. When they retrieved her camera (back at the station), they took out the memory card and watched the video, but it had "nothing of evidentiary value" on it. He gave her the camera back, but he left its memory card on his desk, and later mailed or handed it back to her.
Her story is that she never yelled "Rollers!" because the young man across the street wasn't outside. She watched the event unfold and she had seen the police being excessively rough. She came out to her sidewalk to videotape the event, which the cops didn't like. They tried to block her visually, and when she went back to her front yard (where her two pit bulls were going berserk), the cops decided to arrest her.
In the end, we believed her story, which is pretty sad. It really looks like the RPD screwed up during the arrest, didn't want the video to get out, and arrested her so they could confiscate it. Not coincidentally, she filed a suit against RPD about minor injuries and the card. The chronology didn't make Richmond look good, either: arrest in April; she filed suit in October; RPD pressed charges in December.
I was fascinated by the process. The judge had a light touch, but let her annoyance be known when necessary. The two attorneys were cordial with each other, but I enjoyed the sparring and pas de deux of the questioning. We deliberated for only about an hour, starting with 9-3 not guilty, but quickly got everyone to agree that most of the charge we didn't believe, and the small portion that was possible did not rise to the level of beyond a reasonable doubt. I played foreman and made, like, $45 plus gas.
