|
At 09:19 AM 7/29/2007, identity withheld wrote:
Just had to share this.This is a forward of an email I got from my friend Chris who keeps getting called to jury duty in downtown Detroit. Chris and I worked together in Dearborn for about 15 years and even when things were very grim in the Dearborn schools, we always laughed a lot...
Just returned from 2 days at the Murphy Hall of Justice where I was again chosen for jury duty. This case involved two black men...one the victim and one the bad guy.
Trouble was, both were really bad guys and we had to decide just who was the "baddest" Here's the cast...the perpetrator was a 30 something male drug dealer who was allegedly "deranged" and in this state, armed robbed and carjacked the victim (also a drug dealer) not once but twice within the same month.
The victim (also known as "the pimp" for his interesting choices in trial clothing - a buttercup yellow suit the first day and a pale lavender suit the next day), a 42 year old father of 22...(no, I did not stutter...22 children) was robbed at gunpoint of his Cartier sunglasses, Cartier necklace, Cartier earrings, Cartier bracelets, $100 and was told to strip "nekkid". He then ran, "nekkid" (the word in the questioning and testimony used by both the victim and his defense attorney!) through a vacant field and into the house of an acquaintance. Mind you, the nekkid man weighed about 300 pounds, so it must have not been a very pretty sight unless of course he had Cartier family jewels as well.
Anyhoo...after the victim took off running, the perp decided to take the victim's 1994 black Lexus and blow the pop stand with all the loot...hence the charge of carjacking. Now, the car didn't really belong to the victim...and it wasn't clear whether it belonged to his mother, one of the baby mamas or was stolen itself.
Funny thing was that even though the first robbery took place in a neighborhood at noon, there were no witnesses...or at least none that would come forth. And also, the victim did not report the crimes to the "poe-leece" until many hours after the fact. We had one black woman on the jury who speculated that there were no witnesses because if anyone did see anything, they were probably involved in drugs themselves and would not have wanted to come forth. She also suggested that the victim did not report the crimes right away because he probably was considering "street justice" first. Maybe one of his 22 children or one of the baby mama's talked him into going to the poe-leece instead!
Needless to say, we did find the perp guilty of armed robbery and carrying a concealed weapon (and as an already convicted felon this was a double no-no!), but found him not guilty of carjacking as we did not feel that his original intent was to carjack...but the car was running, (just like the nekkid man) and they did need a quick ride out of the 'hood...so...
|
