No humor in this post, either.
For the trial for which I flunked out of the jury pool, the defendant was dressed fairly well. He looked middle-class, successful.
Until jurors noted the man standing in the back corner of the courtroom when we rose for our (innumerable) breaks. The man was dressed in full police blue, trying to maintain a neutral posture, but clearly alert to trouble.
His uniform shirt read not Seattle Police nor King County Sheriff, but Department of Corrections.
How do jurors not draw the inference that the defendant was not just spending his nights in jail but was dangerous? That he needed to be guarded on his breaks, that he either wasn’t trusted to return to the court or might engage in an act of violence? Remember, he was on trial for domestic assault.
The judge can presumption-of-innocence every hour, the jury can fully understand what that means, and yet, multiple times a day, jurors are confronted by very real evidence that the defendant is considered dangerous. Or that his word is not to be trusted. Or both.
I suspect there’s a good book in here somewhere, but non-lawyer that I am, I’m not the one to write it. Grisham, Scottoline, Turow: this one’s yours.