>
> A friend just finished jury duty in Federal court and had a
> difficult time reaching a verdict. It was a drug case
> involving transporting meth. The problem she had was that
> she felt the police lied and tampered with some of the
> evidence to strengthen their case but that they did so
> unnecessarily. She believed the defendant was shown to be
> guilty even without the questionable evidence. Her question
> was basically whether it was acceptable to find a defendant
> not guilty, in spite of believing in his guilt, in order to
> punish the police for lying and altering evidence? I'm
> curious what others think they would do in a similar
> situation.
I was a juror in a felony prosecution a few years back. The defendant was accused of three charges; for two of them there were several witnesses, material evidence, etc.; all jurors quickly agreed to return "guilty" for those. But during the trial when I'd heard one particular witness's testimony, which contradicted other witnesses's statements, I was convinced that that witness had lied. I argued for hours with the other jurors that a.) a significant part of witness A's testimony was evidently fabrication, b.) without witness A's testimony there'd be no case against the defendant on the third charge, c.) having been caught lying about one major detail, every other thing that witness A said also had to be discarded as grossly unreliable, and therefore d.) I vote "not guilty" on the third charge.
At first all the other jurors felt that since the defendant was in fact guilty of the first two charges, let's go ahead and declare him guilty of the third as well. After arguing for an afternoon and through the next morning I convinced the rest of the jurors to acquit the defendant on the third charge. Ordinarily I'm disinclined to hang people up like that when they want to go and I know they didn't like it but there was no way I was going to send a guy to jail on the basis of testimony that was bullshit even if I had to stay all month.
In your case it's not one dishonest witness with a grudge but the prosecution themselves who tampered with the evidence, so you have to toss every assertion the prosecution made. That's not "punishing the police" but reasonable doubt.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net