People v. State

. . . was the verdict yesterday in an Elkhart County trial in which I represented the defendant. The jury took all of thirty minutes to deliberate, twenty-five of which I assume were for the sake of appearances. I had tried my damnedest before the trial to get the State to drop the charges, on the grounds that their case was crap. Meanwhile my client sat in jail for almost eight months awaiting trial, since his family couldn’t afford the bond for a Class B felony. (I had made a couple Criminal Rule 4 Motions for the defendant to be released on his own recognizance, to no avail.) After the verdict I went in the jury room, along with the judge and the two deputy prosecutors who’d tried the case, for the traditional post-game analysis. One of the jurors indicated that many of them wondered out loud during their brief deliberations why they were even there. The foreman said the trial was not what he expected, and that he would have thought the prosecution would have something more substantial than what they presented. One of the alternates wanted to know who makes the decision to bring criminal charges. The answer from one of the deputy prosecutors: “the deputy prosecutor.” She couldn’t blame her boss for the fiasco that had just occurred (even though I had personally asked the Chief Deputy Prosecutor to drop the case because it was crap). Word could get around.

In response to the suggestion by these jurors that the Elkhart County Prosecutor’s Office had just wasted two days of their time, the judge (who had taken my motion for a directed verdict under advisement) commented, with a bit of a smile on his face, that it had to do with the “relentless pursuit of justice.” Only later did it occur to me that he was probably alluding to this.

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