 |
 |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|
|
|
|
State v. Mann6/6/2000
, he said using his figures, it can't come out the way he said it did. In my mind, common sense tells me it can't come out."
Juror No. 10 stated that she "d n't know if [Juror No. 7] brought anything from home. He did have a couple of figures that he had thought about and it was explaining his point of view on the testimony of Dr. Watts." She also noted that the jury took early, initial votes on the counts against Defendant, although she could not remember in which order, and that " here was a lot of guilty, a couple of not guilty and a couple of undecided."
Next, the district court interviewed Juror No. 7, who spoke at length regarding all aspects of the jury's deliberations. Of his own participation, he maintained that he did not dispute or discredit Dr. Watts' testimony; instead, he said Dr. Watts' were "fine calculations and I would agree with the calculations." Instead of disagreeing with the testimony, he felt it did not "answer the right question," that is, he could not see the "logical tie" between Dr. Watts' testimony and Defendant's conclusion that his son died as he argued. Instead, he felt Defendant's theory "just doesn't jive." Therefore, to "verify own gut feeling" on the subject, Juror No. 7 sought to "quantify" his thinking on the evidence at trial.
Toward this end, he walked through "a probability calculation, and did this in head first." This calculation found its genesis in Dr. Watts' calculations presented at trial. Juror No. 7 insisted that he conducted no experiments. Instead, he told the court that he used his "professional judgment" and approached the matter as an "engineering problem." As he stated to the court, echoing Dr. Watts' explanation of the series of events necessary to prove Defendant's theory correct, "this whole scenario with screwdriver on top of a hamper ultimately impaling a kid, there's a sequence that has to occur in some form or fashion for that to happen." Accordingly, he "did a fairly simple five-step probability" calculation which, again, grew out of Dr. Watts' testimony.
This exercise, in essence, distilled five distinct events from Defendant's argument of what happened to Noel. Juror No. 7 approached these events as questions: (a) did the screwdriver land at the correct angle to the floor relative to Noel's falling body?; (b) did it land "blade up"?; (c) did it separate itself, as it fell, from the other items with which it had been knocked off the hamper?; (d) did it land at the correct location on the floor?; and finally (e) how frequently ought such accidental deaths occur in the population-at-large? Of the last question, he stated:
Well, I go quite regularly to the hardware stores. I have never seen an OSHA warning label on a screwdriver that says "caution, this might be hazardous to your health, take the following precautions." . . . So I am saying man, there's no-I guess you would call that consumer protection or something, but there's no evidence from somebody that that's kind of their job to look out for our protection on this that ever indicates there's a problem.
It is not clear from the record to what extent Juror No. 7 conducted this inquiry in his head and to what extent he shared it with his colleagues on the jury.
Finally, the court interviewed Juror No. 6. Of Juror No. 7, she stated: "I feel that the particular juror that-the engineer juror, to me that was just his way of venting his feelings and thoughts and emotions during the deliberation." She further stated:
We all went home that weekend over deliberation, and it was on my mind, the whole trial during the whole weekend, and I don't see how any of us could have not thought abou
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 New Mexico Personal Injury Attorneys
Personal Injury Lawyers
|
| |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|