Recently in Crime and Punishment Category

I was on the Penn State campus the day of Betsy Aardsma's fatal stabbing, in fact, I had been in the stacks earlier that day.

Aardsma was in a narrow row of shelves that now houses bound foreign-language periodicals when she was set upon, according to the locations given in police reports.

She was stabbed once in the chest and grabbed a shelf, sending a row of books cascading down. Some students overheard the noise and found Aardsma on the floor.

They tried to help and initially thought she had fainted. She was wearing a red sweater and red dress on which blood did not show, but she bled into her lungs and died in the library.

So I've long been interested in the case but had assumed that no one was actively pursuing it after nearly 40 years.

That assumption was wrong:

Trooper Kent Bernier inherited the Aardsma case with another state police trooper two years ago, after the previous investigators retired. [...]

"We're just looking at it differently and trying to do different things that haven't been done yet," Bernier said.

Their search for new angles on the old slaying includes modern forensics testing unavailable to the 1969 investigators.

"It's possible now that DNA might be a big breakthrough for us," said Bernier.

He would not give specifics on what was to be tested.

Read the full story of Betsy Aardsma's murder case.

There is even a web site: whokilledbetsy.com

Driving back to Philadelphia this afternoon on the Schuylkill Expressway, I noticed the vanity license plate of the car in front of me:

VERDICT

Probably someone in the legal community, but I'm really curious as to who it might be.

One of my favorite writers and certainly my favorite prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, has just published a new book.

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder could be his best one yet.

I'm watching Amy Goodman interviewing Bugliosi right now.

And I downloaded a sample of the book to my Kindle...

...with intent to buy.

Thursday during the late afternoon rush, there were probably eleven people muttering under their breath, as they made their way home; they could have left at least an hour earlier, if only that one juror hadn't been so stubborn.

That's speculation, of course, and wouldn't be admissible as evidence in a court, but it is true that one lone juror did extend the deliberation period by at least an hour.

I was that juror.

The trial wrapped up today, as expected. The jury deliberated, had some spirited, passionate discussions, and eventually reached a verdict.

I expect to write about the details of the case as soon as I can clear my head; it was an emotional day.

And no, the jurors weren't really angry. Considering that we were debating issues that would affect the liberty of a human being, we all remained remarkably civil.

I didn't write down their names, but I did try awfully hard to learn to associate them with their numbers. (There were also two alternates, but I won't try to spell their somewhat uncommon names.)

 1 Lisa
 2 Mathew
 3 Sandra
 4 George
 5 Patricia
 6 Kenisha
 7 Yasseline (pronounced more like Jocelyn)
 8 Veronica
 9 Linda
10 James (that would be me)
11 Joseph
12 Ellen

Hope I got that right. Thanks to all!

There was a brief discussion of the price of gas as The Jury was chatting today.

Someone mentioned that gas cost about a dollar a gallon when she learned to drive.

So I chimed in that it only cost 30 cents a gallon when I learned to drive.

I think I just revealed my age...

Today was the first day of the trial, and tomorrow may well be the last.

It was also the first day that the jury gathered together as a distinct group. Yesterday, our panel of 50 prospective jurors made little attempt at conversation, which made the three-hour morning wait extremely excruciating.

But now that we have become The Jury, and there are only 14 of us (including the two alternates), we've started the process of "Getting To Know You".

And you'll never guess who kicked off the process.

That's right. It was The Curmudgeon.

The Court Crier had given us a list of our juror numbers and first names, and I was simply trying to match up the names with the numbers.

I knew that Number Nine was Linda, as she and I had begun talking the day before and had always been next to each other. And Number Eight had made a spectacular entrance this morning, so I knew who Veronica was. And I knew Number Eleven, Joseph, from yesterday's session.

But uttering this out loud, and admitting that as Number Ten I was James, started a round robin of name claiming.

That broke the ice, and so the conversations started.

As Sandra said a little bit later, "James, you got us going and now you're just sitting back and taking it all in."

Guilty as charged.

BTW, this seems to be a great group of people. Looking forward to tomorrow.

Unlike most folks, I enjoy jury duty. At least, I enjoy the trial part, if I get chosen, and so far I've been impaneled three times; twice in criminal cases and once in a civil suit.

In fact, I have a pretty good track record; each time that I've made it to the voir dire and been questioned, I've been selected.

And my track record remains unbroken, as I've just been selected for another trial, starting tomorrow!

Can't write about it until it's over, of course.

One thing I can say, however. It's made me rethink my strategy of owning an iPhone to reduce the number of gadgets that I have to carry. The Criminal Justice Center requires one to check all cell phones at the door; which meant that the long hours of waiting to be called were all that much longer without having my podcasts to ease the tedium...

It was interesting listening to the questioning of the prospective jurors, as each side tries to decide who will make a good juror for them. They ask questions to see if a person has any biases that might keep her from making a fair decision, and I suppose that's reasonable.

But what they really should be doing, in my opinion, is trying to find the folks who have good critical thinking skills.

Yeah, I know. That's easy for me to say.

I will say, though, that it's been my experience that jurors really do try to come to a fair decision, though obviously my experience is limited...