Hayat Juror Recounts Pressure During Deliberations
by TChris
A juror in the trial of Hamid Hayat regrets her vote to convict. Arcelia Lopez swore in an affidavit that she was pressured to put an end to the jury's deliberations by casting the final vote to return a guilty verdict. Lopez said she "never once throughout the deliberation process and the reading of the verdict believed Hamid Hayat to be guilty."
Lopez said she went to a medical clinic Saturday with a migraine headache and believed "my health and physical well-being were being affected by the pressure from the other jurors to change my vote."
It isn't unusual for jurors to succumb to pressure -- jurors don't like to spend days in a small room eating stale pizza -- and it's almost impossible to overcome a verdict with the testimony of a juror who has second thoughts about the outcome. This report, however, suggests that the jury may have been exposed to media accounts of the trial -- the kind of extraneous influence that would provide a more fruitful ground for attacking the verdict.
Several jurors agree that Hayat's nationality was the focus of one juror's ugly comments:
She quoted him as saying, "If you put them in the same costume, then they all look alike."
"The alleged racial slurs, to me, were not anything," said juror Mark Varno, 54, an engineer from Granite Bay (Placer County). He said [juror] Cote was referring to notorious international terrorists who wore traditional garb and beards.
"I think we were all shocked when he said it," said juror Lori Macias, 46, of Fairfield. "He apologized. I'm sure he wished he never said that."
The rest of us can wish that no juror would judge a defendant because of his race or nationality.
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