Journey to Justice: A Juror's Perspective

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Bang! “All rise!” the clerk shouted. All twelve of them shuffled through the door, creating a muffled sound that broke the eerie silence of the courtroom located at 1127 Tower Lane. They solemnly walked down the hallway to the jury room. Unlike previous breaks in the trial where they laughed and conversed about their families and jobs, they were silent except for the occasional cough or sneeze. All of the jurors sensed the magnitude of the situation and felt the hallway stretching in length, a never-ending path between where they heard the arguments and where they would decide the verdict. As the door closed behind the last juror, the mood within the room changed. To each and every juror the room felt foggy and closed. Up to now the closed …show more content…

As she began to formulate her first question, she ran over the outline of this case. The District Attorney produced a case of a man who is charged with having broken into an office building to steal company tax files and killed a cleaning lady who ran into him as he was rummaging through the file cabinet. The prosecution had adequately established motive and opportunity for the murder but the question of how Isaac had gotten in the building troubled all who were in the courtroom. No doors were broken into. No alarms were triggered. How could the killer have gotten in? The only direction the jury was pointed in was to a small narrow window overhanging the trash disposal entrance. That single window was the focus of the majority of the trial. Window experts were brought into testify and cross-examined and cross-examined again. Crime scene pictures of the window were shown, examined, measured, and shown again. The window seemed much too small for the defendant to get through. Both attorneys focused much of their closing arguments on the window, and there was running joke among the jurors (except for Judy) that a murderer was going to come through the jury room windows one day with all the attention windows were

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