So, once jury selection was finished on Tuesday afternoon, we started to hear testimony. The first witness called was the defendant's wife, the alleged victim in the incident.

There are probably things more wrenching than listening to a woman describe how her husband of 33 years beat her. But at this moment, I'm not sure what they would be. I was close to tears during much of her testimony that first afternoon, and I don't think I was the only one. (The court very thoughtfully provides a box of tissues on the witness stand, but they don't provide any in the jury box.)

I'm not sure how much I should describe the testimony in court. The witnesses for the prosecution were the defendant's wife, the fiance of the couple's daughter, the couple's doctor, and the police officer who took the initial police statements from the husband and the wife and made the decision to arrest the husband. The witness for the defense was the defendant.

The testimony managed to establish a certain number of things reasonably clearly:

• That on a particular Saturday in October, the couple had an argument, followed by a physical struggle in which both parties recieved injuries. (She was bruised, and had an injury to her bad leg. He had been hit in the head with a golf club and had scratches on his chest and arm.)


• That the following morning, the wife left the apartment she shared with her husband and went to her daughter's apartment. The daughter and her fiance took pictures of her injuries.


• That the following Tuesday, both the wife and the husband had doctor's appointments. The doctor, upon seeing the wife's injuries, called the police.


• The police officer who responded to the scene interviewed both parties briefly, and made the decision to arrest the defendant.

However, what was really critical to the case was establishing what went on in that argument and struggle on the Saturday. And that was tricky, because the only two witnesses there were the husband and the wife, and they told completely different stories. The basics of her story were that he asked her to have sex with him, she refused, and he became violent. Her story was somewhat confused as to the exact order and sequence of events after that, but three key incidents were: 1) he forced open the door of the bathroom to get at her, breaking the strike plate off the door frame as he did so. 2) In the bedroom, he held her down on the bed and tore off her underwear and 3) he followed her from the bedroom to the living room, and she went back into the bedroom, got a golf club, and hit him with it. He then threw her to the ground and punched her repeatedly in the head.

The husband told a completely different story. He said they had been arguing through the closed bathroom door about some pictures of his mother. That his wife came out of the bathroom, grabbed a golf club, hit him with it, and then he threw her on the bed and they struggled over possession of the golf club.

So, essentially his story was that he acted in legitimate self-defense.

Neither of them were perfect witnesses. The wife seemed somewhat confused, and it was difficult to get a clear temporal sequence of events out of her testimony. (Under the circumstances, I don't find this surprising, really. In the event that I'm ever assaulted, I don't think I will be keeping a careful count of how many times my assailant punched me in the head, or whether he did it the first time he threw me on the ground or the second.) The husband was also unclear on some things. Both also had details in their stories that rang oddly true.

The testimony of other witnesses more or less served to confirm that the wife had suffered injuries and that she had not wanted to call the police.

The testimony took up Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday, and Thursday. Honestly, I don't know how jurors who serve on longer trials cope. I came home at the end of each day mentally and emotionally exhausted. Later, during deliberations, some of the jurors told me that they had had trouble sleeping at night.

So, the lawyers did their closing arguments on Friday morning. Then the judge read us a fairly lengthy set of instructions. These instructions explained the nature of the charge, inflicting corporal injury on a spouse. They also explained that if we found the defendant not guilty of the charge, we could find him guilty of the lesser charge of misdemeanor spousal battery. They also explained the meaning of "innocent until proven guilty", "beyond a reasonable doubt", and explained the law on self-defense.

After a lunch break, we began deliberating. We started by going through all the evidence, trying to decide what the evidence established as fact. We agreed on roughly the set of facts I listed above. Our principal evidence, aside from testimony, were the wife's medical records and the photographs taken by various people of the injuries to both parties. It seemed to most of us that the injuries to the wife's head (or the apparent lack thereof, since there was only a small red mark on her forehead visible in photographs, and no swellings or bruises to the head documented in the doctor's notes) were not consistent with her story that the defendant had hit her in the head 4 to 8 times. On the other hand, none of us were sure that the bruises on her arms were consistent with his story. (If you were wrestling for control of a golf club, wouldn't you grab at the wrists, not the upper arms? Would the struggle over control of the club really leave bruises that dark?)

We looked and looked for some inconsistency that would allow us to definitively discount one side or another's story. We couldn't find anything.

Eventually, we turned to our instructions, and looked at the definition of self-defense. Did we agree that, if the defendant's story was true, he could have been acting in self-defense? We did.

So, what it boiled down to in our minds was this: starting from a presumption of the defendant's innocence, had the district attorney proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant had not acted in self-defense?

We decided that she had not. This was probably one of the hardest decisions I've ever made. My gut feeling was that, on the whole, the wife was more credible. If we had been instructed to decide on the preponderance of the evidence, or to choose the story we preferred, I think we would have voted for a conviction. But without any evidence that unambiguously corroborated one side or the other, we did not feel that simply preferring one story over the other was sufficient to eliminate reasonable doubt.

(This was very frustrating. If the wife's head injuries had been more clearly serious, or if the prosecution had produced her ripped clothing or a photo showing damage to the bathroom doorframe, that probably would have been enough to tip the balance for us. But in the absence of that, the defense had presented a good enough case to convince us that there was reasonable doubt.)

We took a vote about 3 times, with discussion in between, just to make sure that we were really unanimous. We discussed the meaning of our instructions very carefully, and we came to the conclusion that we really had no other choice: if we were going to apply the law correctly, we had to vote to acquit on both the misdemeanor and the felony charge.

The foreperson filled out our verdict forms, and called the bailiff on her cell phone to let her know that we had reached a verdict. We waited in the jury room for the lawyers and the defendant to come back to court. They gave us survey forms to fill out about our jury experience. We all wrote down that the jury deliberation room was much too hot and stuffy.

Eventually, we were called back into court. Our foreperson handed our verdict forms to the bailiff, who handed them to the judge, who read them silently. I watched his face as he read them, looking for some kind of sign of surprise, or disappointment, or relief, or puzzlement, but I couldn't interpret his expression. Then he handed the forms to the clerk of the court, and she read the verdict out loud.

The defendant burst into tears when she read the words "not guilty".

Then it was over. The judge told us that we could now discuss the case freely, and that we should feel free to talk to either of the lawyers if we wanted to. (I briefly considered staying to tell the prosecuting attorney that we had thought she had presented the best case that she could have, but that the evidence just hadn't been clear enough. But I figured she probably knew.) I got a piece of paper from the bailiff showing the dates of my jury service.

Then I went home.

I am left with profoundly mixed feelings about this whole thing. On the one hand, my faith in our criminal justice system as a criminal justice system has been strengthened. I was thoroughly impressed by the professionalism and skill of everyone involved, from the judge to the attorneys to my fellow jurors. Before this experience, I had a certain amount of skepticism about whether jurors were really capable of holding to the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" and of really considering what the evidence showed instead of making decisions based on gut feelings. Before this, if you had asked me whether a black man, with two prior domestic violence related convictions, represented by a relatively inexperienced public defender, accused of the crime of beating his wife, could get a fair trial, I think I would have laughed.

But he did get a fair trial. And I see no reason to assume that this was a special or unusual case.

On the other hand, I have to deal with the fact that I set free a man who probably beats his wife. Now, I don't think I had a choice. The law makes a big distinction between "probably" and "beyond a reasonable doubt". But still, I feel like we've failed the wife in some way. She's stayed with her husband for 33 years, in spite of the fact that he's sometimes abused her. She said on the stand that she still loves him and wants to reconcile with him. She didn't call the police when this incident occurred, partly because she didn't want to get her husband in trouble, but partly, her future son-in-law testified, because "she didn't believe that anything would be done." Will this result do anything to convince her that she deserves better treatment from her husband? If he harms her again, will she be willing to go to the police for help?

It's not the job of a criminal trial to deal with these kinds of questions. But I think that I'm going to have to come up with some kind of way of dealing with these questions.