“Or maybe they would have just rendered a guilty verdict for the sake of self protection....It works both ways.”
You could be right. But something needs to be done to restore the public’s faith in the integrity of our jury system. It would have been easier for me to accept their verdict if they’d actually taken the time to deliberate. Just 11 hrs (less time for picking a foreperson, reading/understanding the rules, meals and breaks) for a 6-week trial tells me their minds were already made up when they went into the jury room.
I agree, that is very short, and I don’t believe they took the proper time to consider all evidence, so I don’t know how they came to such a conclusion either.
But it is the system we have and, as all things human, we won’t ever get it right all the time.