REGRETS, JUROR NO. 4 HAS A FEW
A chronicle of my four days on the no-mercy
jury.
CALIFORNIA
CODESPENAL
CODESECTION
403-420.1417. (a) (2)
Every person who, except in self-defense, in the presence of any other person,
draws or exhibits any
firearm,
whether loaded or unloaded, in a rude, angry, or threatening manner, or who in
anymanner, unlawfully uses a
firearm
in any fight or quarrel is punishable as
follows: (A) If the
violation occurs in a public place and the
firearm
is a pistol, revolver, or other
firearm
capable of being concealed upon the person, by imprisonment in a county jail for
not less than three months and not more than one year, by a fine not to exceed
one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that fine and
imprisonment. (B) In all
cases other than that set forth in subparagraph (A), a misdemeanor, punishable
by imprisonment in a county jail for not
lessthan three
months.“Without
the fulfillment of [jury] duty, the court system simply would not work and the
guarantees of freedom and justice in this country would become meaningless. Too
many of our fellow citizens are not willing to ‘get involved,’ and
many find any number of excuses to avoid jury service. As you may have found,
for most people, jury service becomes their most intense exposure to the
democratic decision-making
process.”—
From a Dec. 11 thank-you letter to the jury by Judge Frederick H. Bysshe,
Ventura County Superior
CourtRodney
Icenbice and I both know what it’s like to regret something we’ve
done. For five seconds
last July, Rodney pointed his dad’s Glock 26 at three teens in a
shouting match with his father on Cochrane Ave. in Simi Valley. For five hours
last month, I deliberated with 11 other jurors whether Rodney should be punished
for pulling that gun. I was one of four who voted first to acquit Rodney.
Eventually, I changed my mind. I tried not to look at Rodney’s face as the
judge’s assistant read our verdict aloud to the court: guilty.
The following week I
got a hand-signed letter from the judge thanking me for my participation on the
jury. But like a member of the Broward County Green Party, I now wish I had
voted differently.
Criminal courts require
juries to deliver a unanimous verdict. No ballot of mine has ever counted more
than the one I cast to convict Rodney Icenbice. Given the odds of me being
impaneled for a second time on a criminal case, I doubt I will ever again have a
vote that influences events so directly. If our scrutiny of two
witnesses’ testimony had not convinced me to switch sides, the outcome
would have been a hung jury. (I doubt there is any chance all eight of the
jurors who initially voted to convict would have been persuaded otherwise, no
matter how long we argued.) Rodney would get then a second trial, or Rodney
would go free. I’d sleep easier with either of these scenarios than I do
now, with Rodney headed for jail for a minimum of 90 days after he is
sentenced.To understand
my remorse, you need to know some things about me, about Rodney, and about his
father, Chris Icenbice. Let’s start with the one of these three on whom I
am indisputably an expert: I hate handguns. I’m hard pressed to think of
any invention that aids society less. (Car alarms, maybe.) If someone aimed a
gun at me on the street, whether they intended to fire it or not, I would want
that person to taste prison food for long time. That said, I don’t have
to strain my imagination to think of scenarios in which I would rather have a
gun in my hand than not.
On a dark street last
summer, Rodney Icenbice found himself in one of those situations — or so
he testified. He and his father were driving home from a movie when a young man
allegedly stepped into the street in front of the their Ford Taurus, forcing
Chris to swerve to avoid him. Seconds later, the Icenbices heard something
strike their car. Chris made two U-turns before pulling over and confronting
Kenny Petty, the 17-year-old he says was the street, as well as two women who
were walking down Cochrane Ave. with Petty.
Chris has been a Los
Angeles County probation officer for 27 years. According to his own testimony,
tussles with hostile persons are just another day at the office for him. When
he got out of his car and approached Petty that night, he felt safe enough to
leave the smaller of his two 9mm Glocks — the one he carries with him in a
fanny pack when off-duty — in the car. Chris testified he confronted
Petty simply to ascertain if Petty was drunk, high, or otherwise in distress.
Whatever his intent was, fat, fiftysomething Chris Icenbice and the stocky,
teenaged Petty were soon standing nose-to-nose trading profane oaths at a rude
volume. One of Petty’s companions, 19-year-old Nicole Wolfe, testified
that her friend Nina, who was absent from the trial, stepped between the two
men. Rather than try to defuse the confrontation, however, Nina verbally dared
Chris to hit her, Wolfe said.
As the argument
continued, Rodney Icenbice, who up to that point had obeyed his dad’s
order to stay in the car, walked over and urged Chris to leave with him. When
his father didn’t listen, Rodney went back to the car and brought out
Chris’ gun. The witnesses differed over who Rodney trained the pistol on
and for how long, but everyone agreed that Rodney’s appearance with the
gun ended the confrontation. As the Icenbices drove away, Petty called 911 on
Wolfe’s cell phone and read the Taurus’ plate number to the
dispatcher. Chris and Rodney had only been home for a few minutes when Simi
Valley police officers knocked on their door.
Rodney was charged with
exhibiting a firearm “in a rude, angry, or threatening manner”
— a misdemeanor, albeit surely one of the most serious. In charging
Rodney with this crime, the prosecution assumed the burden of proving to the
jury Rodney was not acting legally in self-defense. So the central question of
our deliberations was, did Rodney believe his father was in imminent danger when
he drew the gun? As we attempted to agree on a verdict by scrutinizing the
letter of the law, the question evolved: Would a reasonable person placed in
such circumstances believe Chris Icenbice was about to be hurt or killed, and
that the threat of deadly force was necessary to deter his would-be
attackers?A couple of
other things contributed to the surreal atmosphere of the proceedings. For one,
the judge allowed us to submit questions for the attorneys to ask witnesses. We
were given small squares of blank paper, on which we were to write questions as
they occurred to us and hand them to the bailiff. He would place them on the
bench, where the judge would summon the attorneys to collect the questions if he
deemed them appropriate. As far as I know, the judge passed along each of the
perhaps two dozen questions we submitted. Also, one of the bailiff’s
duties was to instruct us in making noise whenever the judge conferred with the
attorneys in private, to prevent us from overhearing them. Whenever the lawyers
approached the bench, the bailiff would loudly announce it was time for a
stretch break and then begin bellowing small talk in the direction of the jury
box. It was an amusing tactic, and it mostly accomplished its purpose.
Before court in the
morning, and again upon returning to the courtroom after lunch, Rodney waited in
the hallway for the bailiff to open the doors along with the rest of us. The
judge had sternly forbade us to discuss the case anywhere but in the jury room,
but this still struck me as inconsiderate and unfair to
Rodney.Ironically, the
two testimonies that ultimately convinced me to change my vote came not from the
prosecution, but from the defense. These were the statements of Rodney and
Chris, the defendant and his father.
In an effort to explain
the testimonies of two prosecution witnesses who said he had
“clicked” the gun at them, Rodney said he’d produced the sound
by thumbing the safety catch of the weapon from the “off” into the
“on” position. But Glock pistols do not have thumb-activiated
safeties — they use a trigger safety, which is exactly what it sounds
like: a safety built into the trigger. This makes the Glock very safe for
trained users, but arguably even more dangerous to people who don’t know
what they’re doing. Rodney’s ignorance of how to use the
gun’s safety mechanism indicates it would have been frighteningly easy for
him to fire by accident.
Rodney ultimately did
himself in with an apparent plea for the jury’s mercy that had exactly the
opposite effect. Under cross examination by the Deputy District Attorney,
Rodney said, unprompted, that he knew what he’d done was wrong.
(Actually, Rodney
first said what he’d done was “unprofessional.” A curious
word choice, given that Rodney works as a call-center supervisor, but one easily
attributable to his anxiety. But his father, the veteran law enforcement
officer, was certainly guilty of forgetting his professionalism.)
Indeed, even before he
hung himself with his apparent mea culpa, Rodney’s demeanor suggested his
lawyer had done little to prepare him for the questions he would be asked.
While no one could blame a young, first-time defendant in a criminal case for
being nervous, surely he could have been coached into offering a more convincing
testimony. For one thing, Rodney did not address the judge as “your
honor” or the prosecutor as “sir.” With the exception of a
Simi Valley police officer, none of the other witnesses did either, but they
weren’t trying to convince a jury to keep them out of jail. Such a detail
is theoretically irrelevant. But impressions matter, and never more so than in
cases like this one, wherein no physical evidence exists, and the jury must in
essence choose which side they believe. Worse, Rodney answered most of the
prosecutor’s questions with a verbal torrent, giving much more information
than what was requested. I am obviously no legal expert, but this hardly
strikes me as the sort of behavior a competent defense lawyer would encourage.
The comments that upon a second listen allowed the jury to agree on a guilty
verdict came during one such fit of logorrhea.
The testimony I found
most troubling was that of Chris Icenbice. Of the four key witnesses, only
Chris had experience testifying in criminal trials. He understood the potential
impact of each word he spoke under oath better than anyone. He knew what the
jury needed to hear to acquit his son: At some point during his argument with
Petty and his two companions, he believed his physical safety was threatened.
But Chris never said
this. Instead, he undermined his son’s claim of self-defense by saying
not only that he had Petty (who amply demonstrated his belligerence for the
court in his own testimony) under control, but that he paid no attention to the
two women while he quarreled with Petty. “They weren’t a threat to
me,” he told the court, effectively torpedoing Rodney’s claim that
Nina, the missing witness, stepped between Petty and Chris and reached behind
her back as though to draw a weapon. Rodney had earlier testified that it was
this action by Nina that provoked him to draw Chris’ gun. Wolfe,
testifying for the prosecution, corroborated Rodney’s claim that Nina had
stepped between Chris and Petty and loudly dared Chris to hit her. Yet Chris,
ostensibly testifying in his son’s defense, did not recall the woman whom
two other witnesses said was “in his face” shouting, “Hit me!
Hit me!” Rather
than support his son’s version of the incident, Chris spent most of his
time on the stand spouting self-impressed platitudes about what a badass he is.
He testified that he needed “about three seconds” face-to-face with
Petty to determine the 17-year-old was not a serious threat. He described
approaching Petty and the women on foot after parking 20-25 feet away from them,
in accordance with his training, to give himself time to watch and assess the
trio before accosting them. “It’s the assumptions you make that get
you killed,” he told us. Perhaps he thought this kind of fatuous
tough-guy blather might dazzle us into overlooking his hypocrisy: If Chris was
the trained and unassuming observer he claimed to be, he would never have
discounted two of three potentially hostile persons on account of their gender.
I wondered why the
defense had he bothered to call Chris as a witness at all, given the
latter’s refusal to corroborate his son’s story. Did Rodney’s
attorney know Chris would do this?
In the end,
Chris’ testimony convinced me of nothing so much as the fact that he
wanted us to find Rodney guilty. Moments after we delivered our verdict, I saw
father and son exit the courtroom together, Chris with resting a consoling arm
on Rodney’s back. But on the stand, it was Chris’ apparent contempt
for his physically slight, awkward, nerdy offspring that seemed forever on the
tip of his tongue. At one point, the prosecutor asked Chris what, if any,
instruction he had given Rodney in the safe handling of firearms.
“He’s into computers,” was Chris’ dejected reply, which
he repeated in response to a follow-up question a moment later. “He was
never interested in going shooting with me.” The day after Chris’
testimony, I recalled that comment as I sat in the jury room contemplating
Rodney’s fate. I wondered if Rodney might reach for dad’s gun to
prove to the old man he was no pussy.
We listened to a
playback of Rodney’s testimony immediately before voting to find him
guilty. The few of us who felt some lingering ambivalence assured one another
that as a first-time offender, Rodney was unlikely to see the inside of a jail.
In the hallway after the trial, we asked the prosecutor what the likely sentence
would be. He first said Rodney would probably get probation. Only after he
asked a senior colleague walking by to confirm this, did we learn of the
charge’s minimum jail term of 90 days. His ignorance of the penalty in
the case he had just tried stunned me. Upon hearing Rodney would definitely be
going to jail, one of the jurors who had initially joined me in voting to acquit
Rodney, an elderly first-grade teacher, exclaimed “That’s
awful!” I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. Rodney was an
anxious, dull kid with no college education, a father who hated him, and a
crappy job he was about to lose. In a couple of months, he would be an ex-con.
And misdemeanor or not, the fact that he had done time would haunt Rodney no
matter what he tried to do with his
life.For days after the
trial ended, I tried to figure out why I felt so guilty over having cast the
vote that would send Rodney to jail. After all, he had pointed a loaded gun at
and briefly threatened the lives of three people, whether he meant to or not.
Yet I felt certain Rodney would never repeat this behavior even if we turned him
loose. Rodney wasn’t someone who carried a gun or went looking for
trouble. He had acted foolishly, yes, but in a questionable situation his
father had, in effect, created. (When the prosecutor asked Chris if he could
have simply avoided the confrontation with Petty, Chris replied with a question
of his own: “Physically or morally?”) What purpose would
Rodney’s incarceration serve, other than to make it exponentially more
difficult for him ever to land a decent job? Would locking up Rodney deter even
one person from reaching for a gun out of anger or fear or a need to affirm his
masculinity? I doubted
it.
Posted: Sat
- December
14, 2002 at 12:20 AM
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Published On: Oct 10, 2004 03:05 PM
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