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Juries can be hard to figure. A lawyer friend of mine was one of two whites on a federal court jury with five black members. They acquitted a young black defendant on federal felony gun charges.

The federal government claimed that a long ago routine temporary state court order of protection against domestic violence should have been disclosed on the defendant's background questionnaire as a bar to gun ownership. The young black defendant was employed in three blue collar jobs, had no criminal record, and the old girlfriend who had obtained the routine order of protection testified that the defendant had never threatened or even raised his voice against her. He wanted to buy a handgun to defend himself and his pregnant fiancee in the rough neighborhood where they lived.

From the outside, it must have seemed that the blacks on the jury had worn down the two whites. Actually, the most conservative member of the jury -- my pro-gun white lawyer friend -- had begun as the lone holdout for acquittal.

The foreman -- a vociferously antigun liberal white college professor -- had pushed hard for conviction and initially carried the five black jurors. My conservative friend though gradually won the blacks toward acquittal by pointing out numerous factual and legal flaws in the prosecution case. The college professor then reluctantly joined in the acquittal, thinking that he had lost the argument to a white more liberal than he was.

I have been on three juries. The first one involved a young black man accused of dealing drugs. He decided to take a plea bargain before we were to start deliberating. The second one involved a black man who had robbed a liquor store. The chief witness against him was a black woman who happened to be in the store at the time of the robbery. I was an alternate so did not take part in the deliberations, but I was told by someone I knew who was one of the regular jurors that a black woman on the jury was very strongly for conviction (their deliberations only took an hour).

The third time it was a civil case with only 8 jurors. The plaintiff was a black woman who had been fired from her job for incompetence. She was suing for back pay and hefty punitive damages. The employer wisely has as their lawyer a very articulate black lawyer. It only took us 45 minutes to decide for the company. At least one of the jurors was black, maybe more, but we reached a consensus quickly.