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 weekend and life in general. However, when we headed upstairs to the small jury room, conversation largely ceased. As we waited for the bailiff to take us into the courtroom, there was silence. I looked around the room at everyone, and while some folks were more talkative than others, I realized there were two men who had never spoken to anyone. They didn’t talk to anyone now that we were down to 14; they hadn’t talked to anyone when there were dozens of us potential jurors.

In this idle time of silence, I decided to look around the room and engage in a sort of "Breakfast Club" profiling of those present. I knew there would be so much more to each person than a superficial profile, but I did it all the same:

• Juror #1 - 20-something, white female who I think is super hip because she has a bunch of cool tattoos on her arm
• Juror #2 - 20-something, Asian guy who is very tall. He is super quiet and speaks very softly. 
• Juror #3 - Late 20's or early 30's white guy. He always wears a trucker hat even though the bailiff specifically stated it would be respectful not to wear hats in the courtroom
• Juror #4 - This is the guy that never came back between voir dire and opening statements
• Juror #5 - She is a grandma. She is a white woman probably in her 70's
• Juror #6 - Black guy in his late 40's or early 50's. He is super stylish, and a super professional, finance guy 
• Juror #7 - An Asian guy in his 30's or 40's. He is super stylish like #6. He was one of the guys that never spoke.
• Juror #8 - White female probably in her mid-50's. She doesn't have a ton to say, but she is super-friendly
• Juror #9 - Me. 
• Juror #10 - Late 30's or early 40's white guy with a blue-collar type look to him. He is a super nice guy, but kind of quiet.
• Juror #11 - Exceedingly nice 30-something Asian woman. I have already learned that she is married with a few grade school aged kids. She is super pleasant to talk to.
• Juror #12 - Late 50's or early 60's woman. She appeared to be South Asian. She doesn't say a lot, but she is very friendly
• Juror # 13 - 30 something, super quiet Asian guy. He is the other guy that never spoke.
• Juror #14 - Mid 50's white woman who is an empty nester. For some reason, I have an impression that she might be more on the conservative side of the political spectrum, but I could be completely wrong.
• Juror #15 - This is the juror that was called into court the first day and then was suddenly gone
• Juror #16 - Guy who is in his late 20’s, or early 30’s. I had chatted with him a lot since the very beginning. He is a really nice guy. He might be Latino. He is a software guy for a large, local company. He has wife and young baby. 

At that point, I didn't know more than one or two people's real names, but I anticipated getting to know all of them on a deeper level than just their juror numbers and superficial descriptions over the next several weeks.

After a bit of waiting in the small jury room, the knock on the door finally came, and the bailiff was ready to walk us into the courtroom. Once we were seated, Judge Phelps immediately informed us that due to a scheduling conflict, even though the video expert was not quite finished, they would call a different witness and come back to the video expert later.

With that, Ms. Patti Eakes for prosecution called the ER doctor from Harborview Medical Center to testify. This doctor was the first person to ultimately treat Jesse after arriving in the ambulance with gunshot wounds to the abdomen and head. He testified that upon immediately encountering Jesse, he first noticed the gunshot wound to the head, describing it as being through his eye. Hearing the details about that wound made me a bit queasy, as I have a particular aversion to any wounds involving the eyes. It all sounded very gruesome to me as he testified that Jesse's eye was "protruding."

The doctor went on to describe the gunshot wound to Jesse's abdomen and noted that Jesse was losing a significant amount of blood as a result. He explained that they were fighting to replace the blood being lost through the abdominal wound and struggled to keep up. At a certain point, they rushed Jesse to the operating room for surgery to attempt to control the bleeding. The doctor testified that when they opened up Jesse's abdomen, they found an inordinate amount of blood, which was emanating from his liver. He explained that an injury of that type to the liver was particularly challenging to repair or to stop the bleeding. Ultimately, they could not control the bleeding, and Jesse went into cardiac arrest. 

Hearing the doctor's testimony made me realize why the state was charging the first shot to Jesse's abdomen as second-degree murder. While the shot to the head was perhaps more gruesome, it was not as much what they needed to treat as the priority. The wound to the abdomen was so severe, and if that could not be controlled, nothing they did with the head would have been efficacious.

As Ms. Eakes finished her questioning of the doctor, I remember thinking, "Wow, she is really good at what she does; she is a super professional litigator." I was very impressed by her and figured she was high up in the hierarchy of the King County Prosecutor's Office. I assumed that the District Attorney for King County must have assigned this case to their best and most experienced prosecutor.

It then came time for the defense's cross-examination. Ms. Kristen Murray was the attorney for the defense who would question the emergency room doctor. As she started her questioning, I got the impression that she was tough. She had a tone of polite skepticism, and there was an air about her that suggested she was ready to jump down your throat if you said something incorrect. She gave me the sense that she was a force to be reckoned with, and a bit intimidating.

As she questioned the doctor, she zeroed in on the fact that there would have been nothing Officer Nelson could have done in the field to treat Jesse. I remembered that the prosecution had pointed out in their opening statement that Officer Nelson was wrong not to immediately attend to Jesse's injuries at the scene. I thought, "Ah, smart of her; she is chipping away at the idea that Nelson's actions showed depraved indifference."

She then went on to ask the doctor whether an injury to the liver would render a person completely incapacitated. The doctor replied that it would not necessarily incapacitate someone immediately. I found that information important because I knew Ms. Murray was trying to make the point that the second shot to the head was necessary because the first shot hadn’t stopped Jesse from trying to harm Officer Nelson. I found this line of questioning from Ms. Murray quite effective; up until that point, I had been completely convinced that the second shot to Jesse's head was totally unwarranted. I still wasn’t sure about that second shot, but she definitely planted a seed of doubt in my mind with her questioning.

The doctor was ultimately on the stand for about 40 minutes, and I look back at his testimony as some of the most difficult information to process. It was hard to hear about such devastating injuries to Jesse in such graphic detail. That said, it was very important to hear from the emergency room doctor, and I appreciated his testimony.

After the doctor's testimony, we took a morning break. During the break, Juror #3 started commenting on the doctor’s testimony and said something to the effect of, "That was gross to hear." The rest of us didn’t engage or discuss anything about what we had just seen. While we had chided him yesterday for not talking about the case, we let his comments slide this time.

At some point during the break, I started chatting with Juror #6. At that moment, we hadn’t even really introduced ourselves by name, but I would later learn his name was Anthony. We had a fairly quick conversation, chatting a bit about our jobs. I said something like, "I hope tomorrow's testimony is lively because I have a conference call with a customer in London overnight at 2 a.m. I’m going to be tired tomorrow."

After about a 30-minute break, the bailiff brought us back into the courtroom to hear more testimony about the video evidence. While I had to shake my head a bit to stay awake, it was important testimony. The video expert had done a lot of work to synchronize different cameras that captured the altercation between Officer Nelson and Jesse Sarey. Thanks to this expert, we could see that Officer Nelson was much bigger and taller than Jesse. The video expert clearly testified that after the first shot, the video showed Jesse falling away from Officer Nelson, not lunging toward him at all. I remember watching the video and feeling like there was an eternity between the first shot and the second shot. In reality, the video evidence showed that about 3.5 seconds elapsed between the shots. We also learned that Officer Nelson's gun had jammed, and during those 3.5 seconds, you could see him tapping and re-racking the gun. I struggled with all that a bit. On one hand, 3.5 seconds doesn’t sound like much time to decide whether it was necessary to take that second shot at Jesse's head. On the other hand, it was enough time to tap and rack his firearm. Just watching the video, it feels like SO much time. Then I started counting in my head, like you would as a child counting to 10 in a game of hide-and-seek... One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. When I counted that way, I realized that 3.5 seconds is longer than it sounds on paper. As the video expert's testimony continued, I wrestled with whether Officer Nelson should have reasonably expected to make a clear assessment of whether there was a threat from Jesse after that first shot.

Throughout the testimony of the video expert, issues and objections arose that required us to wait in the hallway behind the court or in the jury room. Sometimes we would wait for 5 minutes, while other instances lasted up to 30 minutes. Each time that happened, there was a good amount of chatter among us jurors. In all cases, that chatter was completely within Judge Phelps' rules, with the exception of juror #3. Throughout the day, #3 consistently made comments about the case. When that happened, some of us would shoot him a look. Anthony (#6) admonished him at one point. Juror #3 would always acknowledge and apologize for it, but he seemingly couldn’t help himself. It seemed to me that most of us were getting frustrated with #3, but everyone was very polite and tried to gently persuade him to adhere to the rules. Ultimately, I think we all let it go because he never expressed his outright opinion about things; he skirted the line between breaking and following the rules.

After reviewing the video frame by frame for most of that Monday, by late afternoon, both sides still had not finished their examination of the video expert. At that point, we were released for the day with the instructions Judge Phelps always gave us. We all headed out of court, got into our cars, and headed home.