In the comments section of today’s post on the Zimmerman trial, I noticed some discussion of the significance of the jury’s request this evening for clarification on the definition of manslaughter.

First of all, I think that juries are inscrutable and unpredictable. So all bets are off with juries.

That said, though, I have never thought there was much of a chance for an acquittal in this case, although I also think the case is so weak that it should never have been brought—and if brought, I think that the judge should have thrown it out for lack of evidence after the prosecution had finished its presentation.

But the best result I had ever hoped for—at least that I thought had a realistic chance of actually happening—was a hung jury. I still think that is a possibility, although I have been fearing that Zimmerman will instead be found guilty of manslaughter despite the strength of the self-defense argument against it.

However, I don’t think that, as some people have suggested, the fact that the jury has asked for clarification of the definition of manslaughter necessarily means that they have rejected the possibility of self-defense, although of course it’s certainly possible. One reason I say that is that the jurors might just be going down the judge’s list in order, and I’m under the impression that manslaughter came after murder on that list but before self-defense. The second reason that they might want to decide on manslaughter first, without having taken up the question of self-defense, is that the question of whether Zimmerman committed manslaughter seems easier to decide than whether or not to find him not guilty of manslaughter because he acted in self-defense. So if the jurors looked at manslaughter first and were to decide there was no manslaughter in the first place, they wouldn’t even need to consider the more complex question of self-defense.

In the comments to my earlier post, “Oldflyer” mentions another concern:

I wonder how these women will feel if they convict GZ for manslaughter and then find that the sentence is exactly the same as for 2nd degree Murder? Thirty years in prison, or until Martin’s avengers catch him alone.

And “carl in atlanta” adds:

These jurors may think they’d be doing a GZ a big favor by returning a manslaughter verdict. No doubt they believe the penalty will be much, much less. After all, drunk drivers and enraged spouses get convicted of manslaughter all the time and they seem to get relatively light sentences…

If these jurors convict him of manslaughter, most of them are going to be in for the shock of their lives.

Agreed. Jurors are purposely kept from knowing the penalties for the crimes for which they might convict the accused because the penalties are supposed to be a separate issue from, and irrelevant to, whether that person is guilty and whether the necessary elements of a crime are present. The idea is that knowing the penalties would taint the jurors’ thought process in terms of deciding guilt and non-guilt. But the process is just as tainted if the jury doesn’t know the penalties, because in the real world people often make these decisions about guilt in difficult cases in part based on a weighing how serious the crimes under consideration are and how much of a price the accused might pay if convicted of one crimes versus the other. It would be better if they had the correct information rather than just speculating, wouldn’t it?

I have seen a number of documentaries about criminal cases in which members of the jury who convicted someone found out afterwards that the penalty was much much different (either much lighter or much heavier, depending on the case) than they had assumed while deliberating. They tended to be angry and distraught about the ignorance in which they had been purposely kept, although I don’t know how common these feelings are. In addition, if they found out after the fact that evidence they thought would have been crucial had been kept from them during the trial and deliberations, and would have affected their decision one way or the other, they likewise tended to be extremely distressed when they found out (in the Zimmerman case, I could see this happening if and when the jury learns about the Martin cell phone evidence that was excluded, for example).

In some cases, it haunts certain jurors for the rest of their lives. I have seen interviews with some in which, decades later, they are still in tears about a decision they thought they made that in retrospect they thought was too harsh or too lenient, one that they said would have gone differently if only they had known the full situation. Sometimes jurors have required therapy to try to deal with their own feelings of guilt and/or anger. Sometimes they have appeared before parole boards years later to ask that the convicted person be released if the juror thought the sentence was unjustly harsh.