Jury service was very frustrating

I recently completed jury service that wound up lasting for at least part of five different weeks; I was a sworn juror in a murder trial that involved one dead body, two defendants, two different Los Angeles gangs and a drive-by shooting.

Nobody got convicted, even though I could give you good odds that both men were guilty.

All that happened was that I got to see a lot of the frustrations police and prosecutors must have serving as the thin line between us and total anarchy.

There are a lot of crimes -- murders even -- that are never charged and never come to trial. Without circumstancial evidence or eyewitnesses, there's simply no way to convict a defendant.

In our trial, two members of one gang -- the shooter and the driver -- were on trial for killing one member of a rival gang and wounding two others. One of the two who had been wounded was an eyewitness to the shooting, which took the life of his closest friend.

He had identified the two men in a police interrogation and in the preliminary hearing in February. But by the time of our trial, he was starting to feel the pressure to stop being a "snitch." He recanted his testimony, saying that he had lied earlier.

This was serious business. Snitches get killed and so do their families, so our witness actually had shown a great deal of courage earlier and just couldn't sustain it.

We were asked to believe he had told the truth earlier and was lying now, and there were too many people of the jury who just couldn't make that leap of faith. It didn't help that the young man who basically appointed himself our jury foreman was as close to a bleeding heart as you see these days.

We acquitted the driver and hung 11-1 for acquittal on the alleged shooter.

Our foreman was practically weeping. He told us he was "heartbroken" that we couldn't agree on an acquittal for the other young man, and that he might have to spend more time in jail if the district attorney chose to try the case again.

I felt like suggesting he get a testosterone shot, but I didn't.

When several of us -- not including our foreboy -- talked with the DA after the verdicts were announced, she disabused us of any notion that these were good guys wrongly accused. Both of them were already serving time on other violations, and the driver had actually done time for a murder he had committed as a juvenile.

I asked her why she had brought the case, given such a small hope of victory.

"It's my job," she said. "I feel like I owe it to the people in the community who will come forward to try the case."

I wasn't the holdout. I didn't see any point in it, but in retrospect I wish I had held out on both men. Not that it would have made any difference, but if folks are going to make the Sisyphean attempt to push the boulder up the hill, the more help they get the better.