…we’re talking about the rape and murder of a 4-year-old girl. With crime scene photos. And autopsy pictures. And the victim’s mother on the stand.
(Trigger warning. I won’t get too graphic, but even some of the broad details are rough.)
It’s a resentencing case, because the convicted murderer was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole after he committed the crime as a 15-year-old back in 1986. The law subsequently changed, mandatory life sentences for minors became illegal, and the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered a re-sentencing. Which finally began today.
This was my first time witnessing a jury being selected. It’s a unique case, since they will not be rendering a verdict of guilty or not guilty, but simply deciding on a sentence. But the selection procedure seemed identical. Like many things we have seen before in legal movies or TV shows, it was kind of like what you expect, but more boring. Attorneys for both sides asked fairly common-sense questions of the pool as they were called. Almost none of them got the heated, direct, one-on-one questioning we sometimes see in a legal thriller when a hotshot lawyer is determined to get a questionable potential juror tossed. There were also no grandiose announcements by the attorneys when they did decide to use a challenge and reject one—those were handled in quiet sidebars.
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