D*MN!!

Boy, I didn't know how right I was. The mission was impossible!

I spent the last three weeks serving on a jury -- you knew that. But the fact that it was a murder trial puts it in a higher strata. So after spending seven of those days in deliberation, we ended up exactly where we started on the first day -- 10 of us said the defendant was at the crime scene and pulled the trigger, 2 said they weren't sure. In the end we were deadlocked; the judge had to declare a mistrial. That was frustrating enough. What happened next had us pulling our hair out.

The judge came to talk to us in the deliberation room. That's when we could ask all our questions about gaps in the case. The judge actually had the answers -- and ALL of his answers cleared up the doubts of the 2 hold outs. The defendant absolutely committed the crime. The 10 of us were right -- and there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it.

So -- the good news, such as it is -- the defendant does not go free, he gets tried again. And being a full time drug dealer, he's in jail on other charges and won't be getting out any time soon anyway. The sad part -- this was NOT a drug deal gone bad where the victim was a criminal, too. Nope -- this scumbag popped one of the good guys. The victim was a 24 year old father of two, honorably discharged from the navy who was a criminal justice major. He was about to be hired by the department of corrections and had plans join the state police.

And while I hate the unfinshed business we were a part of, what is much worse is the victim's family has to go through all this again. It's a bad business. A very bad business and whether I did the best I could or not, I'm sorry it ended as it did.