Could Juror B29 have stood her ground?
theGRIO REPORT - When she went public in an on-camera interview with ABC News, the juror in the George Zimmerman trial previously known only as B29 addressed a lot of questions including the most obvious one...
Maddy told Roberts, “I don’t know if I was bullied. I trust God that I wasn’t bullied,” saying she was “the loudest one, my voice was heard.”
She was the only juror who wanted to convict on second-degree murder at the beginning. (According to Juror B37, who spoke with her identity concealed to CNN two days after the trial ended two other jurors initially wanted manslaughter, while she and two others voted to acquit from day one.) However Maddy told Roberts she wasn’t the only juror who wanted to hold Zimmerman accountable.
“A lot of us had wanted to find something bad, something that we could connect to the law,” she told Roberts.. “We felt he was guilty. But we had to grab our hearts and put it aside and look at the evidence.”
Zimmerman defense attorney Mark O’Mara said on his blog Friday, “We do ask jurors not to reach their verdicts based on what their hearts tell them; for the verdict, a juror must set aside emotions and follow the law. Based on her comments, Juror B-29 accepted a tremendous burden, set her feelings aside, and cast a verdict based the evidence presented in court and on the law she was provided.”
Former prosecutor Lisa Bloom, who analyzed the trial throughout for MSNBC, said she feels compassion for Maddy, and that while Maddy said race was never discussed, the fact that she was the only non-white juror could easily have affected the dynamics of the deliberations.
“Look at the way it played out, with the one minority juror being the one who voted for second degree murder early in the deliberations.” Lisa Bloom said. She added; “and that’s why we need more people of color on juries, because there is a cultural dynamic to the relationships and the factions that are formed, particularly when a jury is sequestered,” Bloom said. “It’s not that all white people think the same, or all black people or Hispanic people think the same, but there clearly are differences.”
To the extent that race played a role, Maddy insisted the issue was never brought up during deliberations. But in the aftermath of the verdict, it appears to play a part in her view of her own role. Asked by Roberts if she has any regrets, Maddy said, “Kind of. I mean I’m the only minority. And I feel like I let a lot of people down.”
Pressure on jurors can be intense
Michael Silva served on the 2007 jury that acquitted one member of the Liberty City Seven — a group of Haitian-American men accused of plotting terrorism after being ensnared by an FBI informant posing as a representative of al- Qaida. The men, who were members of an obscure religious group, claimed they were trying to scam the informant out $50,000.
The jury hung on the other six. A subsequent jury hung on identical charges against the six remaining defendants in 2008, though five of them were later convicted on terrorism-related charges, and one acquitted, in 2009. The convictions were upheld by an appellate court in 2011.
Silva, who is African-American, says his 12-member jury, which was about one-quarter minority, endured nine hours of deliberations in which some jurors put constant pressure on the group to simply come to an agreement and go home. His jury wasn’t sequestered, but Silva said the pressure was intense nonetheless.
“We sat for nearly 10 weeks [during the trial] I think, so it was a very long period of time,” he said. “And when I watched the Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman situation, when the case went to the jurors, I thought to myself, somebody’s gonna say, ‘I want out. I don’t want to be here anymore.'”
Silva, a broadcast consultant and former radio executive, said that as in any organization, stronger and weaker negotiators emerge in a jury setting. “It’s a matter of saying, you know what? In order for me to go home today, I need to give in to something.”
He says that Maddy “could have held out and caused a hung jury, but you have people who have strong personalities and people who have weak personalities, and if you don’t hold your ground in there, you’ll succumb.”
Silva says the rules against jurors talking about the case outside of deliberations are impossible to enforce.
When you put 12 people in the room, what are the gonna do? Talk. What do they have in common? The case. Nobody there knows each other. Nobody’s created any friendships because people are walking on eggshells and trying to be cautious,” he says. “The ‘how’s your day, how’s your weekend’ stuff lasts about a day.”
The jurors in the Zimmerman trial were sequestered, but they had some alone time, and time to talk with family members. They also went on outings together, to the movies, bowling and to the nail salon. Whether they formed bonds, or factions, is impossible to know.
And while Maddy told Roberts she thinks she made the correct decision under the law, she added that she wished in her heart that she could have done otherwise, even saying she was “forcibly included in [Travon’s] death,” and adding, “I carry him on my back.”
Coffey says it’s not that unusual for jurors to have recriminations after a particularly difficult trial.
“It’s not the first time there’s been juror’s remorse” in a case like this, says Coffey. “It can be a real dilemma for a juror to weigh the duty to listen to others while also having a duty to adhere to their own beliefs. It’s not extraordinary for a juror to look back at a verdict and believe there are things they wish they had better understood. But the system doesn’t permit any reopening [of the case] based on this juror’s I’m sure sincere and honest statements.”
Next: Hung juries are rare
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