Not to leave everyone hanging, today I was indeed a juror. The pool was 18 people, 17 white non-hispanic, 9m and 9f (ages 30-70 I'd guess), the dress was 'business casual' and for the most part it was, a couple folks did wear dressy jeans, one dude (30) who clearly wanted nothing to do with jury duty wore a T shirt and really worn jeans and sneakers, he got bounced on voir dire, he had all the wrong answers. Comic book guy was another one in the pool, he was excused.
our jury was 6 regulars, (all white male, two lawyers, one Lyft/Uber driver who manages a factory cafeteria, a Financial Adviser, a custom furniture builder and a small business owner) and 1 white female alt. juror (pre-school teacher). I was not the only lawyer on the jury, though the only former prosecutor/defense attorney. The judge said afterwards in the room he was surprised they let me stay, though as I always say, you only get 3 strikes and they need to be the people you really don't want. You accept the rest. The other lawyer was a civil plaintiff's lawyer.
Case: 30s married male sexting a single pic of his schlong to a minor (16), a total stranger on a chat site over the web living way out west. FBI gets a hold of this evidence, they don't see a fed crime and refer to the locals here. They of course have a task force for these crimes (every large metro does) and of course they charge it (a relatively low felony in this state, but still charged as such). The State's case doesn't even get off the ground (@iahawk will appreciate this). They have one witness, the local detective, who's going to tell us about the image and play for us his long interview with the defendant, and they have no way of laying any foundation for the evidence (the image). The FBI witness isn't here, the local detective can't authenticate or credibly introduce the image, he didn't unearth it, the feds did and they aren't here. Defense counsel objects (hearsay), she's so relaxed and State lamely argues one of the many exceptions to the hearsay rule,, they sidebar and dismiss us to jury room. defense counsel, she's so relaxed. We get in the jury room and the others are like 'what's happening?' I simply said, this is stunning, they can't get the image into evidence, we're going to be done by 2:30. 30 seconds later Judge walks in and says 'it's over'.
I don't doubt this whole thing went down as suggested by the State, but HTF did the State think they were going to sneak this into evidence? My only theory is 'There's a task force, we get federal money for it, investigate and charge these web sex crimes, no matter what (similar to how pressures exist to charge every DV case that walks in the door), politically you cannot exercise discretion for these types of crimes, public won't tolerate it. We did get a very nice lunch on the taxpayer dime at a great diner next door.
