Reply #61: Any time there is a jury

[H2O Man]

certain dynamics come into play. And one of the most important tends to be does the jury like the defendant? Do they like the defense attorney? The prosecutor? Or, if it is a civil case, you can fill in the same general blanks.

In the Blake case, it was easy to make the jury dislike the victim. She was more repulsive than the mother in the Jackson case. The jury had no trouble finding "reasonable doubt" (a concept never really defined to anyone's satisfaction) that Blake killed her. After all, the fact that Blake had tried to hire a couple friends to kill her was no biggie: his best friends were creeps. And the fact he was there didn't mean anything.

It's like the old lawyer's joke about a husband coming home early from a business trip, and finds a man hiding in his closet. "What are you doing here?" he demands. "Well, everyone has to be somewhere," the fellow answers. And Blake had to be somewhere, after all!

In that case, the jury's dislike of Blake's wife was sufficient to bring about a "not guilty" verdict.