Jury Foreperson Gives Interview
Juror #1, the foreperson, has given an interview to the Boston Herald, a local Boston newspaper. He is the fourth juror (five, including an alternate) to go public.
Juror #1 was particularly bothered by the absence of a thorough police search inside the home at 34 Fairview Rd (see my previous post on Brian Albert’s interview dismissing this). “If that body was on my front steps, I know my house would have been stormed,” the juror foreman, who is Black, said. “It all seemed like a lot of wishy-washy privilege.”
The foreman thought Michael Proctor’s vulgar texts about Karen Read showed “serious bias” but “I had to put my personal opinion aside.”
Like the other jurors who have talked so far, the foreman thought the prosecution’s evidence was weak. “There was no meat! No a-ha moment. No one proved there was a collision — even with all that jargon. And all the jurors agreed.”
The foreman gave an explanation for why the jury temporarily withdrew its verdict, but the explanation wasn’t entirely clear. He said the initial verdict slips were pulled back “over one male juror who had doubts.” But the foreman didn’t specify what charge the juror had doubts about.
“At lunch, I asked the juror, ‘Are you OK?’ He responded, “‘Do you think I can take back my vote?”
“Other jurors got a little nervous,” the foreman added, “but 20 minutes later he said ‘OK. Guilty of OUI.”
Jeffrey Abramson, Professor of Government and Law Emeritus, Univ. of Texas at Austin, and author of We, the Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy (Harvard Univ. Press).
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