Puckett said she and a few other jurors had doubts about the allegations. But she feared if the case ended in mistrial, another jury would sentence Myers to death. So, Puckett said she agreed to a compromise — find him guilty but recommend life in prison.
Goddamn is that some bad decision making.
I tend to agree, but there is maybe a little nuance here (archived)
Although I believed Mr. Myers was innocent at the time of trial, I made a terrible mistake. The other doubting jurors and I wanted to spare Mr. Myers’s life. But we were afraid that if we were a hung jury and there was a mistrial, a subsequent jury might find Mr. Myers guilty and sentence him to death. As a compromise, we worked out a deal with the jurors who were determined to find Mr. Myers guilty. We agreed to join them and unanimously find him guilty, but then we voted to give him life without parole.
The jury voted for life without parole 9-3. I left the courthouse feeling like that compromise saved Mr. Myers’s life. I thought, at least he would still be alive to be a father to his young son, whose testimony at trial moved many of us to tears. We had been told the judge could override our sentence but that it was such a rare occurrence that we didn’t worry about it. That practice is now illegal, and it should be. Seeing it happen in Mr. Myers’s case was a betrayal of the care we jurors put into considering his fate. It was unjust.
Ultimately, if you ever find yourself in a position where you are concluding that voting to convict an innocent person of a crime is the best way forward you made a mistake in your reasoning somewhere and you need to go back to step one, but I can appreciate thinking that you have to do what you can to work around corrupt systems. Like, highly educated and professional defense attorneys tell clients who say they’re innocent to plead guilty for a lesser sentence all the time, it’s no wonder jurors get the same ideas.
Her job was not to bargain for this man - that is his lawyer’s job. Her job was too make a finding of innocent or guilty and she knowingly convicted a man she thought was innocent. His blood is on her hands.
This is why so many innocent people plead guilty to lesser crimes rather than leave their fate in the hands of 12 idiots.
She wanted to send a message by voting third party and now has regrets.
I would say she voted for what she believed to be a lesser evil instead of voting her conscience, But jury decisions are quite different from electoral decisions so I’m not sure how much utility the underlying analogy has
Her conscience would have been the lesser evil. She was playing 27-D chess instead of her fucking job. She’s a moron who sent an innocent man to prison at the best.
Her conscience wouldn’t have been evil at all imo, she wanted to vote for his innocence but was persuaded that the next best thing was all she could do
She was playing 27-D chess instead of her fucking job. She [was] a moron who sent an innocent man to prison at the best [who clearly feels bad about it now and is doing everything she can to fix it, but that probably won’t have any effect now and doesn’t excuse her prior mistake of not exercising her power when she had it, and there is an important lesson there we should be applying in our own lives today]
imo
It was like 1-D chess, not 27: “if he has a mistrial, the next jury will convict him.”
That’s it, that was her thinking.
She fucked up real bad. 🤷♂️ Good on her for trying to correct it, but the right thing to do was vote not guilty because you didn’t think he was proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Her conscience wouldn’t have been evil at all imo
That’s my point. He would likely be free if she voted her conscience. Even the best outcome from her idiocy was him spending life in prison. She should feel bad either way.
As I said - this is exactly why innocent people will choose a lighter sentence and plead guilty. You never know what some idiot in the jury is going to do.
Holy fuck that’s hilarious! 🤣
The real travesty is that a death penalty is still a possibility in any society.
Were that not a plausible outcome, these jurors wouldn’t have had to wrestle with the moral dilemma of having their actions potentially lead to the death of another human.
I was once in a pool of jurors set to hear the penalty phase of a capital murder. I would never had been seated in a thousand years and it ended up in a deal anyway. But the Judge told us that if we chose the death penalty every juror has to sign the death warrant.
The though of my signature on a document like that still sends chills down my spine.
