I got jury duty till early April
And the trial ended today. I was dismissed before deliberation though, so not only did I not get to contribute, I didn't get to watch the other jurors battle it out. But I can talk about the trial now. I'll keeps it short.
There were three defendants, Pinuelas, Trejo and Jimenez, and one victim, Villalobos. Most of the trial was spent establishing that all four were members of the Sureño gang, how they behave and what they do. And I was really surprised at what I learned about them. They're very formal in their... activities... members have required reading lists and believe themselves the descendants of the Aztecs.
The story is that Pinuelas was the shot-caller of the mesa (Spanish for "table," basically a council of 4-8 elites) of the gang as it was in that prison, and there can only be one mesa. Phone calls from his mother, spoken in code, told him of a rival mesa being formed by Villalobos. Months after, the assault occurred on a recreational yard at noon. It ended before anyone died when officers commanded the entire yard to prone out on the ground, and Trejo and Jimenez were found next to the victim at the scene. Thirteen days after the assault, a written message was found in another inmate's cell that authorized an attack/elimination of Villalobos. The victim's was the only name on it but it most definitely had been written in Pinuelas' distinctive, fancy handwriting. (unrelated fact: the vocabulary was advanced and the spelling was nearly perfect)
What I thought: There was room for doubt. The victim had deep gashes and was probably attacked with a weapon, but no weapon was found. There was a bloody handprint on a bar near a bathroom on the yard and it didn't match Trejo or Jimenez, and at no point after the attack did they have the chance to go there at all. There was a video of the attack caught by a security camera. The video had no sound and was as choppy as a Game & Watch, but you could clearly see something strange. First, the victim was attacked by one person. They stopped, then that assailant left the screen. The victim approached two other people, then the two-on-one between the latter two defendants and the victim began. At one point, they knocked him all down, but in the next frame he got back up and the assailants were backing away from him. I'm no gangster but if I were trying to kill someone with my fists and they fell on the ground, I doubt I would let them get back up. I think the first person probably had a weapon and disposed of it in the toilet.
So in the end it was a trial where the question was, did these three people conspire to kill the victim of that assault? There was no direct evidence that proves Pinuelas talked to Trejo or Jimenez about it, that they ever saw the message authorizing the attack (note: authorizing, not commanding), or that the message was even written before the attack. In fact, one of the details on the authorization claims that Villalobos had displayed "open hostility" in addition to plotting treason...
They were all found guilty.
