Ponder this before your next trial:
I was a juror on a murder case 3 years ago...a mother charged with suffocating her 23 month old son. Similar to this case, there was no physical evidence...no blanket fibers in the child's nose or mouth and the coroner/forensic team could not say how this child died but *speculated* suffocation. The mother (pregnant with her 3rd or 4th child) claimed the child was acting out, had a tantrum so she put him in his room and made him go to bed at around 4pm. She did not check on him until 10 or 11am the next morning...he was dead, his body already badly decomposing because he'd obviously been dead for a while.
Once we got into deliberations...I spoke out and said I had a hard time finding this mother guilty where there is no cause of death. How can we charge her with a crime when no one knows HOW this poor little boy died!??! We were going back and forth and it was looking like we were going to be a hung jury (another juror felt the same way I did), until another juror said, "She is responsible for that child! Any action or INACTION to that child is her responsibility." And then it clicked. There wasn't much evidence against her, but the fact that she put her son to bed at 4pm without dinner AND DID NOT CHECK ON HIM ONCE, put everything into place. What parent doesn't check on their child for 18+ hours??!!! She didn't check on him because she knew he was dead and she was using all that time to put her actions & story together.
Life is often random. Today's aggregate acts would not make an interesting plot line. I walked around; bought a new mattress; drank coffee; hung out at the park; played with the dog. A dead body showing up would make no sense at all. Yet what makes random evidences random is, well, randomness. Stuff that makes no sense happens every day.
Yet people think in narratives - stories. Everything has to be consistent with a narrative. If a piece of evidence is inconsistent with the narrative, then it will be ignored. If a piece of evidence does not exist - but is consistent with the narrative - then that non-existent evidence comes to life.
Here, the mom did not check up on her baby. Therefore, she must have been a killer. Rather than a bad mom. Or a mom who was just happy that he kid was finally getting some sleep.
If trial lawyers are always stressed, who can blame them? A trial lawyer has to look not just at what the evidence actually is; but what evidence the jury might make up. How can you know what a person is going to invent?
And what's the narrative: She was a bad mom? A negligent one? You must come up with a counter-narrative. Yet calling someone a negligent mom frames the issue against the client. "Even her lawyer thinks she was a bad mom, so even if she's not guilty of this crime, she is guilty of being a bad person." Which is good enough for a verdict in most jurisdictions.
Sometimes a mother puts her kid to bed, oversleeps, and wakes up to a dead baby. There is no explanation. There is no reason. There is no higher purpose. There's just a random tragedy of existence.
I would almost never risk my own freedom before a jury, and would plead guilty to a crime I didn't commit if the terms of the deal were right. It doesn't mean I don't trust the jury system. But juries are people, and people hate admitting that not everything happens according to a Lifetime movie plot line.
