Justice?

No child should ever have to see a parent get shot.

This is 1 of 12 jurors words on what I heard, listened to, debated, learned, about a trial that came down to he said he said..

Undisputed - A mom had a child with one man, they broke up, had a child with another man and was still together at the time of this incident. They met at a grocery store parking lot for one father to hand over his daughter to the mother. That happened peacefully.

What happened next is the heart of the case. These boys men didn't like each other. Words were exchanged between cars. One person got out of their vehicle and walked either slowly or fast to the other vehicle. The other person got out of their vehicle - pushing back the other person. More words exchanged (content in dispute). One said he kept backing up and the other kept going forward. He saw him reaching for a gun and so he pulled his gun and shot first - appears twice - before his gun jammed. The other said he never left being near his vehicle even when he was shot - of course after being shot - he shot back. Hitting the other man - where he fell to the ground.

The police did ask for the main investigative task force to come and investigate the crime but was denied. We don't know why. This left it up to a one year on the force officer to do the investigation. He didn't mark where the shell casings fell (that could show approximately where shots were fired) he sent another officer to see if there was any video at the businesses nearby - only the grocery store had some but the officer decided it didn't show enough to be worth collecting. A car window was blown out possibly by a bullet - nobody tried to find that round which could then be determined the caliber and thus who fired it. (the round was found later but we weren't told what happened to it afterwards) And..

The defendant was charged with two crimes and with the minutia of the law, and not being able to keep my notes I can't recall the exact wording of them. On both - you had to meet a 4 part test. We all agreed it happened in the State of Washington - that was the only 100% undisputed part. The rest came down to - was it self defense or not. 

The basics of the law states "Washington Law allows a person to use reasonable force to defend themselves when they are being attacked or have a reasonable belief that they are about to be attacked. A person may not use more force than is necessary given the situation. The law does not impose a duty to retreat."


A lesson I learned is there is evidence admitted to a trial, statements admitted to a trial, diagrams and others BUT as we were told at the beginning of the trial - we would be only allowed the admitted evidence to the jury room. All the others are for references, reminders and... only. This became critical in one case where half the jurors heard one thing but the other half heard another - since we were not allowed the transcript  (we asked) we had to go with what we each thought we heard.


Of course there was much more to this case as I stated in the beginning including other witnesses for both the prosecution and the defense and how the other 11 jurors interpreted the law but the case still came down to "Self Defense".

In the end we had a hung jury also known as a deadlocked jury. The final vote was 9 for guilty and 3 not guilty.

This is a photo of my sister and I at a place our parents rented at the time. The children in this case were about our ages.