Today, I literally had to pass judgement on a fellow human being...well, maybe he isn't really a fellow human being because of what he did to a precious little girl. I don't think of him as human, anyway.
I have spent the past eight days pondering, with 11 other human beings, some pretty horrible s***. We had four and then three hold-outs on our jury and I was glad we had them. While I didn't rush to judgement, wanting to hear all the defendant's evidence in his favor, his defense team didn't offer much in the way of evidence to prove his innocence. As in, none.
I was very grateful we had those holdouts because they caused us to remember, not that we needed a reminder, that a man's life hung in the balance. They caused us to review, over and over, our own past experiences, the evidence, the testimony, the way we judge if a person is speaking the truth, the definition of "reasonable doubt", the horror of getting it wrong and putting away an innocent man.
We were admonished by the judge that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Since I have trouble holding two contradictory thoughts in my head at one time, I listened to all the State's evidence while trying to keep this man's innocence in my mind. Trouble was, there was the little girl's own testimony and DNA evidence.
When the State rested, I was prepared for the "on the other hand" evidence and what I (and all the other jurors) got was nada. Zilch. Zero. Goose egg. All we got were a closing statement which contradicted the evidence we'd seen with our own eyes. The Defence even said "she asked for it".
Note to attorney: When you said "she asked for it", that implies that indeed something did happen and the child wanted it. Last time I checked, a 47-year-old male, even if the child "asked for it", should have, could have said "this isn't right." The defendant didn't say that.
I tend to be judgemental, while trying mightily not to be judgemental. Let's face it, we all do it. You see a homeless person or a person who doesn't behave how you would, or a parent in a store, or you name it. We see stuff and we judge it. If we see the whole sum of a person's life and circumstance, we tend to be less judgemental. "On the other hand" becomes an understanding (though not necessarily an excuse) of the behavior we have judged.
First time in my life I have been ordered by a judge to judge. Sadly, we had to vote to put this guy away for life. Sadly because we all secretly wished that the guy hadn't done it. We wished he hadn't done it because we didn't want to ponder or imagine or envision what that poor child had had to endure...what he did to her. For over a year.
Someone commented that the guy was probably abused as a child himself. Don't care. Doesn't matter. My guess is that there are plenty of children out there who are abused and they seek help and grow up to be caring adults who don't abuse. The guy had a choice.
He made the wrong choice and lives are forever altered, forever damaged, forever not the same as they would have been if he'd made the right choice. Souls are damanged, sometimes beyond repair. Several of us on the jury, knowing what we know about pedophiles, thought perhaps she wasn't his first victim. But the judge shielded us from any past history.
So it wasn't gleefully or with joy that we judged the child to be telling the truth, the evidence to be irrefutable. The holdouts eventually became convinced as to the rightness of a guilty verdict. Just as soon as we delivered our verdict, we were able to check the news coverage of the trial, something we had been cautioned not to do during our deliberations.
The man we judged today was indeed a convicted pedophile, something some of us had suspected. The saddest part of the whole thing was that he had been released from prison 12 years ago. Since pedophiles don't stop what they are doing, most probably there is a child or children out there who were abused by this monster. A child or children who couldn't speak out or weren't believed. Yes, our judicial system worked. But not soon enough.
So, to our victim today...you go girl. Go have a life that is full and rich and everything you can possibly dream. Living well is the best revenge, so go out there and live well.
