I feel like I've been punched in the stomach.

The murder trial I've been covering has just come to a surprising climax. A jury returned a guilty verdict inside of five hours in the case of a 23-year-old kid accused of killing his father with an ax and horribly disfiguring his mother.

The prosecutor said yesterday during closing arguments that there were only two things for the jury to consider: either that he is guilty as sin, or that he is the unluckiest man on the planet.

The jury picked the former. A time line of evidence placing him at the scene of the crime certainly made for a plausible verdict. The cards were stacked against this kid from the start in the court and in the media. But it irked me so to know that no one can ever know exactly what happened.

We are by our very human nature unable to be objective. Our inclination to form opinions based on our emotional responses is stronger than our capacity to be objective and look at only the facts.

Regardless of whether or not the kid did it, I just can't see how a jury could reach a verdict without letting the emotional impact of the case seep into judgment.

Maybe I should have a little more faith in the justice system. After all, I don't know everything and I've never actually sat on a jury. But in a world where the guilty have roamed free and the innocent have been locked up...what does it mean to be fair?

What I do know is that verdict or no verdict, no one will ever know what happened on that November night in that bedroom community. It's like An American Tragedy--if there are no witnesses to the crime, what really happened, only God and the defendant can know. In the face of those odds, any human system of judgment can't be 100-percent dead-on. I guess we do the best with what we have.

On the other hand, I'm way too emotional of a person to be covering a trial that was this emotional. I mostly sat right behind his poor mother, a sewn-together version of a formerly gorgeous woman with no memory of the night someone took an axe to her skull--and who truly and deeply believed in her son's innocence. She would lower her head and shake slowly back and forth whenever prosecution waxed poetic on the evidence against her son.

And her glazed-over expression as photos of her when she was found glowed in the darkened courtroom...I don't know a soul who knows that strength.

But it was ultimately she who gave him away--she identified him as the attacker to police the morning she was found by nodding what was left of her head in response to a question of whether her son did this to her and her husband.

It was the only direct evidence with which prosecution could roll. Defense attorneys questioned whether or not she was mentally capable of responding, or even whether her response was a sign of consciousness.

Defense thought the investigation was sloppy, not all leads were followed once police had narrowed in on the son. A taped interrogation of the kid a few days after the attack was forbidden as evidence. Ninety-nine percent of the evidence was circumstantial, they had that right. They brought up possible mob ties and disgruntled litigants harboring grudges against the father, a prominent law clerk in town.

But the jury returned a guilty verdict--some of them came out and said it was the young man's emotionless, seemily remorseless demeanor throughout the course of the trial. He had sociopathic inclinations, it's true, based on a series of admitted loan forgeries, staged burglaries, lies and deceptions.

But so did Chester Gillete, the young sociopath who in 1908 was executed after being convicted of killing his obsessive, pregnant lover in a secluded lagoon up on Big Moose Lake. At the time, a timeline and circumstantial evidence, as well as merciless media coverage stacked the cards against him.

Almost one hundred years later, evidence is popping up that questions that verdict.

I'm not questioning this kid's verdict by any means. There was enough evidence on both sides to make either outcome plausible. I'm just saying, maybe we need to understand the system a little better.