Two area criminal trials recently concluded, with vastly different and unfair results. In the first, a young man who took a baseball bat to an older man's head was convicted only of misdemeanor assault. It didn't seem to matter to the jury that the young man took the bat and several of his buddies to the older man's house (in the small community of Plattsmouth, south of Bellevue), rang the doorbell intending to confront the older man, and hit the man so severely that his face is still disfigured (after at least one surgery), and that the older man faces several more surgeries and over $600,000 in medical bills.
According to several jurors, some on the panel even wanted to acquit the young man at first. This is mind-boggling to me. Those jurors apparently believed the young man's claim that he was afraid, that he swung the bat only in self-defense, and that he was aiming only at the older man's stomach. Right. After HE picked up a bat, went to the man's house, and initiated the confrontation. One does not have to be a major league baseball player to know that a level swing aimed at someone's stomach is not going to hit that person in the face, either.
I get the feeling from what the jurors who spoke up said was that the misdemeanor conviction was the best they could get, and they decided do accept that verdict rather than insist on the more serious felony assault charge and wind up with no conviction at all due to a hung jury.
Omaha World-Herald editorial cartoonist Jeff Koterba got this one just right: he depicted Lady Justice down on the ground, bleeding from her head, a bloody baseball bat tossed on the ground beside her.
Sometimes, however, the system works just right. In Omaha this afternoon, a now 15-year-old man was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of a 6-year-old girl back in 2006. He had been arguing with the girl's caregivers on and off all day (apparently about some drug deal gone wrong), and finally got a gun and shot at them while they were in a car. Of course the innocent 6-year-old was the one who was hit, fatally. And she didn't die immediately. Her last words were, "It burns." [Talk about heart-wrenching!--Ed.] The jurors in this case have been deliberating since late last week, so this was no hasty, predetermined verdict, despite what the shooter's grandmother claims.
No, the young man had no intent to kill a 6-year-old, but by shooting at the car when he could see the people he'd been fighting with sitting in it, he intended to kill. That's the only intent required for second-degree murder.
He was tried as an adult because he had demonstrated repeatedly that he knew and understood the consequences of his actions. His grandmother was also upset that he wasn't "tried" in Juvenile Court, but that's silly. Juvenile Court was set up to handle juvenile things, the kind of pranks and family problems that were common 50 years ago--not murder.
The grandmother seemed to think that since she'd convinced her grandson to go and confess his role to the police late the same night of the crime that the young man should get consideration. But the tapes of his confession, which were aired on the local news programs all afternoon after the verdict was announced, showed that he didn't even want to admit he'd fired the gun at first. It was a long time before he finally "fessed up."
The prosecution wanted a first-degree murder conviction, but I don't think that was warranted, either. Yes, the young man went and got a gun, but unlike the young man in Plattsmouth, he didn't go out and seek his antagonists and confront them. He happened to see them and after some shouted exchanges, pulled the gun and fired--to scare them, he said--but since he aimed at the car and not in the air, he demonstrated he'd formed sufficient intent for a second-degree murder conviction.
So we had a gross miscarriage of justice in Plattsmouth and a major doing of justice in Omaha. I can hope only that the injured man in Plattsmouth files a civil suit against his attacker, so that he can get compensation for some of his medical expenses, at least. Not that it will matter. As all the professors in the Damages course in law school say, "You can't get blood from a turnip."
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