The Worcester, MA, Telegram has an interesting column today by Dianne Williamson, titled “Juror carries a burden for all of us.” Ms. Williamson writes about a juror’s experience in a 1995 trial, which haunts him to this day—and I have no doubt it will haunt him forever.

I’m still haunted by a far-less traumatic trial in which I was a juror in 2007. In fact, the experience redirected my writing toward the justice system. Since I write for several hours every day, that means my thoughts are often on my courtroom experience.

What strikes me most about the Worcester juror’s experience is how similar it was to mine. The stress came primarily from the trauma of reliving a violent crime and then from the judge’s cavalier dismissal of the jury’s decision. In the Worcester case, the crime was a homicide that resulted from a parking-lot brawl. The jury found the defendant guilty of first-degree murder, but the judge later overturned the verdict, reduced the charge to second-degree murder, and assigned a penalty of 15 years in prison so that the convict would be eligible for parole in 15 years. He has now been released and rearrested on parole violations.

In my Cook County experience, the crime charged was kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault. The jury found the defendant not guilty of kidnapping and guilty of aggravated sexual assault. The judge told us after the trial that we had erred in the not guilty verdict. She had wanted us to find the defendant guilty so she could sentence him to 30 rather than 15 years—yes, I, too, thought justice was supposed to be blind. In addition, she told us it didn’t matter anyway, because the defendant had skipped bail and was on the loose. He would never go to prison at all.

How could this have happened? Well, it turned out the defendant was free on bail, despite the violence of his charges. After his public defender admitted to his guilt of the sexual assault charges during his opening statement, the defendant had fled. The rest of the trial was conducted without him. We the jury stupidly believed the judge when she said he had “chosen not to be present in the court.”

In the Worcester case, it seems to me, the problem could have been avoided had the judge refused to allow the prosecutor to over-charge the defendant in the first place. In the Cook County case, the problem could perhaps have been avoided if the judge hadn’t colluded with the prosecutor to over-charge the defendant, too.

Unfortunately, I think the justice system manages to avoid juries all together when it’s working fairly (or maybe I should say is barely working). The only cases that end in jury trials are either ones in which the asystem wants to jail a defendant and throw away the key or ones in which the defendant feels—rightly or wrongly—he is being unfairly treated.

Evidence: CNN’s In Session is currently covering the January trial of a former minister, Matt Baker, for staging his wife’s suicide by drug overdose. Baker obviously either felt he was innocent, was too clever to be convicted, and/or didn’t deserve to be punished (a rather self-righteous personality).

Sidebar: I’ve admitted to a tendency to find conspiracies in everyday events, but only because I write fiction, not because I’m crazy. However, does anyone else think it’s odd that since In Session evolved from live courtroom testimony to edited broadcasts of past trials you can’t run a Google search and turn up articles on the verdicts in these cases? It’s almost as if local media have removed all verdict stories from the web. It’s certainly clear that CNN has removed all verdict stories from its site until In Session reveals the verdict. And, frankly, it even looks to me as if Google is cleaning its archives of these stories. Now, the last time I explained in this blog that Google removed archives occasionally at user request, my blog also vanished from Google listings all together. It was very difficult to restore my ranking. I take it back: I must be crazy to be writing this.