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Chapter 9 – Are We Nearing the End?

  “When Haug testified, that was all I needed. His testimony was really all that mattered to me.” Juror #13 during deliberations   At the time Juror #13 said that, I couldn’t have disagreed more with his sentiment. During the morning of June 10th, we heard from a couple of witnesses. The first was finishing testimony that had started the prior week. Russell Hicks, the assistant training officer during Officer Nelson’s academy training, testified about a variety of things related to what Nelson was trained on. He spoke about strategies for retaining one’s firearm and testified that Officer Nelson was explicitly taught to create distance from a suspect and tactically disengage if he couldn’t maintain control. Very importantly, he said Nelson was taught to give verbal warnings to a suspect before shooting, with repetition being key for these behaviors to become second nature. A particularly poignant statement he made was that officers would actually fail the test if they called
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Chapter 8 - Trial Monotony

"My husband and I don't really like cats. One day, much to my husband's chagrin, I brought home a cat. That cat peed everywhere; it was a nightmare. One day he didn't come home; thank you Jesus!" Juror #5  As the trial ensued, there were days of testimony that seemingly ran together. There were countless moments of contention between both sides. Sometimes, the defense would get upset about a line of questioning from the prosecution; other times, it was the prosecution’s frustration. Objection after objection would usually lead to a sidebar conversation between the judge and the parties. Invariably, those sidebars led to Judge Phelps excusing us from the courtroom. That script of objection…sidebar…jury removed from the room…must have happened dozens of times throughout the trial. The weeks of testimony were constantly dotted with objections from one side or the other. I came to know that pretty much anytime I heard “OBJECTION,” we were going to be sent out of the c
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Chapter 7 - A key witness (at least from my perspective)

"I don't know if Nelson (and I won't call him "officer" at this point because with our finding of guilt on count two, he is not likely to ever be in law enforcement again), I don't and can't know whether Nelson believed he was under "imminent" threat of great bodily harm or death.  I do know that I heard Woodard say that Sarey was going for his gun, and that freaked Woodard out." Me  That was a statement I read out to everyone on the second day of our deliberations. At that point in the deliberations, I couldn’t wrap my head around finding Officer Nelson guilty of the first shot to Jesse Sarey's abdomen based on the statements I would hear from the key witness (at least in my mind) of the entire altercation. Of course, it’s well known that our jury ultimately found Officer Nelson guilty on both counts, so I eventually (and very much definitively) came to realize that he was guilty of the first count of murder in the second degree. As I
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Chapter 6 - Come on #3...learn to keep your mouth shut!

“holy crap, it’s like bad tuna in a can.” Juror #3 (On what Comic Con smells like)   It was a new week, and by 8:40 a.m. on May 20th, everyone was back in the jury assembly room. As we arrived, we chatted a bit with one another. I remarked to Juror #14 that with the loss of two alternate jurors last week, I wondered if we would lose any more. I expressed my hope that the juror situation would stabilize because with only two alternates, things were becoming tenuous. I knew that if we lost any more jurors, the likelihood of a mistrial would increase, and I hated the idea of that happening. As we discussed the fact that we were down to 14 jurors, I said, "Well, our chances of being an alternate keep going down.” From the outset of being selected for the jury, I had the mindset that I would have been disappointed to sit through the entire trial and then end up as one of the alternates. While we were sitting in the larger assembly room, many of the 14 of us chit-chatted about the weeke
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Chapter 5 - Let's Get Going (or maybe not)

  "He could have backed off, Jesse was on the ground. Nelson could have backed off, he had backup coming. He was the aggressor. HE reached down and grabbed Jesse." Juror #5   Juror #5 stated this fact as we went around the room in our initial hour of deliberations. She was absolutely right, and we would see that very clearly on the first day of the actual trial. It was Thursday, May 16th, and I woke up bright and early to be at court by 8:30 a.m. After all the weeks and months of jury selection leading up to this day, I was anxious for the actual trial to begin. As I have mentioned before, I had no prior knowledge of this case. I had never seen any news about it back in 2019 when the incident occurred, and I hadn’t heard anything about it since—until that morning of the first day of the trial. That morning, I went downstairs to have breakfast with the rest of my family, and the local news was on. At the urging of Judge Phelps, I had been trying to avoid turning on l
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Chapter 4 - Voir Dire

“My company wrote a letter to the court asking that I be excused from jury duty, the judge actually just laughed at that” Juror #117  I arrived at court on May 14th and headed straight upstairs to the large jury assembly room. When I walked through the door at 8:20 a.m., I expected to find maybe 20 people there as potential jurors or alternates—wrong! I was surprised to see at least 50 people in the room. I immediately realized, "Oh my gosh, jury selection is STILL going on." I was oddly comforted to see that jurors #117 and #123 were still present. I was glad that a couple of people with whom I had made some connections were still part of this process. After waiting about 20 minutes in the large jury assembly room, the bailiff arrived and led us upstairs to the now-familiar 3rd-floor rotunda. She lined us up as we had been in the past, but this time with significantly fewer people. Even with the reduced number, I was still a little past halfway in the line. I looked at where
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