Wednesday, April 13, 2011

When the Going Gets Tough, The Jury Decides to Punt

How, in the world, can this happen? Apparently, in America, people can go to trial, and if the jury can't decide whether someone is guilty or not, they just forget the whole thing ever happened. Excuse me?! What did I miss?

Although Barry Bonds was found guilty for obstruction of justice, (get this) the jury didn't agree on whether he was guilty about all the lying he did under oath, and offered no verdict. No verdict? What do you mean there's no verdict? You can't decide if he's innocent or not? So we're just going to do nothing about it? Forgive me if I come across a little Lewis Blackian here, but um, jury, let's FIGURE IT OUT.

Is this even allowed? Since when? Ever the opportunists, Bonds lawyers tried to get the lone guilty verdict thrown out while they were at it. Why not? Apparently anything goes in this courtroom. Boy, how come this scenario never made it into a John Grisham novel?

I'm telling you, Lt. Danny Kaffee would never let this stand.

Now there's a very real possibility I'm being dense here. Maybe this sort of thing happens all the time. And perhaps John Grisham did write about it (I'm not exactly his biggest fan). But in 24 years, I've never heard of such an occurrence. If anyone has, or is a big John Grisham fan, let me know--the outrage will cease.

The prosecution has to decide if it's worth it to pursue the case over again, and the one guilty verdict will likely turn into some form of house arrest. So it looks like Bonds made it out of this as unscathed as possible. Let this be a lesson to you kids, if you're going to do illegal things and lie about them, make sure you're rich.

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