Jury system not perfect, but effective

I once sat on a jury in a drunken driving case in which the defendant was the only defense witness and the arresting officer was the only prosecution witness.

It was a pretty simple case and the trial took all of about 30 minutes. The Breathalyzer test was the only real evidence and indicated the driver clearly was well over the legal limit. The officer claimed he saw the defendant leave a pub parking lot and later saw the car swerve.

The defendant’s defense simply was his word that he never swerved and that the police officer should not have stopped him. He never disputed the results of the Breathalyzer test.

As a court news reporter, I had spent years sitting outside the jury room squeezing my eyelids together and trying through osmosis to penetrate that sacred door. I was more than eager to get my chance to weigh the evidence and be, as our president would say, “the decider.”

But as we gathered around that long wooden table we realized that despite our compelling urge to argue and debate our way toward a just verdict, the case was pretty clear-cut and no one seemed to know how to actually begin a serious discussion.

We took a secret vote and, stunningly, the vote was 11 guilty and one not guilty.

Eleven of us were clearly perplexed, while one older woman near the end of the table appeared a bit smug.

“I didn’t like the police officer very much,” she said defensively.

She didn’t think he’d seemed very friendly. Breathalyzer results be damned; she was voting not guilty.

It took us only about 10 minutes to persuade her that despite her personal impressions of the officer, the evidence clearly stacked up against the defendant. She reluctantly changed her mind and we, the jury, found the defendant guilty as charged.

While I may have thought our lone dissenter a bit off-center, our little jury panel was probably quite indicative of the American jury process. It’s not quite perfect, there is plenty of room for error even in the simplest of cases, and justice served or justice denied can rest on the shoulders of one person, who simply may take a dislike to a witness.

I thought about my remarkably simple jury experience this week when it was reported that a Waldo County jury returned a not guilty verdict in the manslaughter case against 50-year-old Mike Nickerson, who stabbed his 44-year-old brother to death last November.

The two brothers lived together in Searsport with their children. The defense claimed that Mike was the victim of domestic violence, with his brother routinely pummeling him with his fists. According to testimony, Mike eventually had enough and stabbed his brother to death.

The law in Maine allows for to people defend themselves but also indicates that such defense should rely on a “reasonable amount of force” as opposed to excessive force.

No matter how many trials I sat through, serious or mundane, the ability of 12 jurors to find common ground and reach a verdict never ceased to amaze me. It took Nickerson’s jury only two hours in what clearly was a complicated and emotional case.

People in and outside Waldo County probably will discuss and debate the jury’s verdict in coming weeks. Why did Mike Nickerson not call police if his brother was assaulting him? Why didn’t he leave? Why did he have to stab him multiple times when perhaps just a swipe or two with the blade might have stopped the beating?

We could wonder whether the Attorney General’s Office should have brought the case to trial at all.

They sound like familiar questions, but are asked more often in domestic violence cases involving a man and a woman, rather than siblings.

The decision to prosecute or not may have been a tough call, but I think in this case the Attorney General’s Office made the right decision. The case was put before a jury and the jury made the decision. That’s our system. Highly imperfect at times, but overall the best we’ve got.

Renee Ordway can be reached at rordway@bangordailynews.net.