OK, trial is over and we convicted a guy on one count of Armed Robbery and 3 gun-related charges. I've never even been called up for jury selection before, so this was a completely new experience for me. While I definitely have my issues with the criminal justice system, I've always had a fondness for court drama (not so much the John Grisham stuff, but trashier stuff like those old re-enacted court shows based on real cases like Superior Court, Divorce Court, The Judge - but also real trials on court TV and of course great courtroom comedies like My Cousin Vinny), so I was pretty excited to have been picked to serve on a criminal case. And now that it's all over and done with, I can finally discuss it! As I stated, the case was armed robbery. The defendent was a 20 year old African American man who walked into a dry cleaners on Capitol Hill with a gun and demanded money from the Korean owner in front of his 9 year old daughter. He took the money, asked for more, then took the battery out of the cordless phone and took off. This was the case that I was on. Ten days later, he hit another Asian drycleaners, this time near Dupont Circle, much in the same manner. He had a gun, asked for money, asked for more money, and took their phone and the security video with him. This time he got caught, and the cops put his picture in a spread to see if the owner from the Capitol hill cleaner could ID him. He and his daughter both identified him from the pictures 3 weeks after the crime, but the daughter couldn't ID him in court and there were some other inconsistancies with the evidence in the Capitol Hill case. So they brought in some evidence from the Dupont Circle case which immediately raised some red flags with me and some of my fellow jurors that the prosecution didn't have enough for the first one and were trying to overcompensate. But after a day of discussing it and working on all the different angles of it, we all reached the guilty verdict, feeling that we did the right thing. After we were excused, the prosecutor and the public defender came into the jury room to talk to us about the case. Before this, even though we were comfortable that he was given a fair trial and that it really was beyond a reasonable doubt, many of us felt weird about having just basically sent a young man to prison. But then we heard from those lawyers. The deffender was amazed that we deliberated so long and had expected us to hand down a guilty verdict quickly. As it turns out, this was only the first of 8 trials for this guy. The reason that we weren't given as much evidence as we would have liked for the second robbery was because they didn't want to spoil it for the next case which is a no-brainer since he even confessed. The other cases against him are more robberies (including 3 seperate federal bank robbery cases), some other assorted things, and oh yeah, a murder. After hearing that, we all felt that justice was served and we helped that happen. Afterwards, half of us went to lunch in Chinatown and who was at the restaurant but the defense lawyer, who bought us all a bowl of soup.