I Was A Juror On A Murder Trial

Last January, I was on a jury for a murder trial: it was my job to determine if Bomani Hairston-Bassette murdered Charles Wright. You’re not supposed to sell your story for money for 90 days after the trial is over, but it’s been more than 90 days, so now I can tell you all about it. I’m going to first talk about the case, then about what it was like, then about how the experience affected my views about the justice system.

The Case

Bomani Hairston-Bassette shot Charles Wright in the back while Wright was running away. There is no dispute about this fact, which is established by three pieces of evidence:

1. A surveillance camera recording of someone shooting Charles Wright in the back while he was running away.

2. DNA testing of the blood at the scene, which revealed it was Hairston-Bassette’s.

3. The fact that Hairston-Bassette showed up at the hospital with gunshot wounds, and there are just not that many people showing up at the hospital with gunshot wounds at 8am on a Saturday, even in Oakland.

Over the course of the trial and weeks of jury deliberations, I watched that surveillance camera recording approximately three hundred million times. For most of the incident, the surveillance camera took only one picture per thirty seconds—leaving crucial holes in the video record.

The sequence of events took place over only a few minutes. Charles Wright was selling drugs on a street corner. Hairston-Bassette’s car circled the block, then parked. Hairston-Bassette left his car unlocked and the keys in the ignition.¹ Hairston-Bassette walked up to Wright calmly, his hands in his hoodie pocket. They briefly spoke to each other. They walked between a pair of parked cars. There was a one-frame scuffle. In the next frame, Hairston-Bassette had a gun and was shooting at Wright, who was running away. Wright’s friend and bodyguard, Antoine Ford, opened the car door and began to shoot at Hairston-Bassette. (Here’s where the video camera noticed movement and started taking a normal number of frames per second.) Wright collapsed to the ground. Hairston-Bassette was shot by Ford and ran from the scene. Hairston-Bassette would go to the hospital with two gunshot wounds: one from his back torso to his front torso, and one from the front of his hand to the back of his hand.

The defense offered two justifications for Hairston-Bassette’s behavior:

1. Actually, Hairston-Bassette didn’t shoot Charles Wright. Charles Wright was shot accidentally by Antoine Ford.

2. Charles Wright shot first, during the scuffle. Hairston-Bassette took the gun from Wright during the scuffle and then shot Wright in self-defense.

   1. You might object that it’s not self-defense to shoot a fleeing man. But under California law it is: there’s no duty to retreat.

Unfortunately for the defense, careful examination of the surveillance video showed that both of its claims were false. There was no point where Antoine Ford could have shot Charles Wright without damaging one of the parked cars—damage that didn’t happen.

We had two auditory recordings of the shooting through ShotSpotter and a nearby Nest camera. The auditory recordings established the duration of the shooting from the first shot to the last shot, which was (if I recall correctly) less than two seconds.² The surveillance camera picked up a muzzle flash, which was the earliest possible time for the last shot.³ But the scuffle—when the defense claimed that Wright shot Hairston-Bassette—was more than two seconds before the last muzzle flash. The only way that Charles Wright could have shot Hairston-Bassette was if the sound didn’t get picked up by ShotSpotter or the Nest camera.

The defense claimed that Hairston-Bassette was shot while he was trying to grab the gun away from Wright, which might have muffled the sound of the gunshot such that it didn’t get recorded. I (and the rest of the jury) found this implausible. Sure, if you shoot a gun into a pillow, it can muffle the sound. But we felt that, if you shot someone in the hand out in the open, you’d still be able to hear something on the Nest camera. And no matter how carefully we listened to it, we heard nothing.

Hairston-Bassette was shot in the front of the hand, which is a little strange if Antoine Ford was shooting him from behind. The prosecution tried to make the case that Hairston-Bassette was actually shot in the back of the hand, which we found unconvincing. However, we carefully watched the surveillance video and determined that, at one point while Ford was shooting at him, Hairston-Bassette’s hand was in a position such that a bullet could have gone through his torso and then through the front of his hand. So there was no reason to assume a silenced shot.

The prosecution’s case, however, had an enormous hole in it: why did Hairston-Bassette commit murder?

No evidence was provided that Hairston-Bassette and Wright knew each other. As far as we could tell, they were complete strangers. The prosecution subpoenaed Hairston-Bassette’s Instagram account and managed to establish that Hairston-Bassette occasionally walked down Brockhurst Street, the street that Wright sold drugs on, but that’s completely meaningless: I also occasionally walk down Brockhurst Street and I had never heard of any of these people.⁴ If they were fighting, or Wright had done something to anger Hairston-Bassette, they’d kept it off the Internet and no one felt inclined to tell the police.

The prosecution offered its own explanations. Perhaps Hairston-Bassette intended to rob Wright; perhaps Hairston-Bassette was a drug dealer and he and Wright were fighting for territory. But Hairston-Bassette not only had a full-time job as a dishwasher at Facebook but also ran his own business selling custom T-shirts and hoodies. I don’t know where he would find the time to have a third job selling drugs. And Wright only had $200 on him: why would someone with two jobs be in such dire financial straits that he would commit murder for $200? Couldn’t Hairston-Bassette just get a payday loan?

The defense’s explanation was that Hairston-Bassette was going out to eat, but then decided to park his car and see if anyone wanted to buy some hoodies. Hairston-Bassette approached Wright, who offered to sell him drugs. Hairston-Bassette was offended at being called a drug user, and Wright was offended at Hairston-Bassette’s offense. They went between the parked cars. Hairston-Bassette thought that they were going to have a fistfight in the street. To his surprise, Wright pulled out a gun. I also didn’t buy this story because it contradicts my knowledge of, you know, humans and the nature of interpersonal interactions.

This situation was honestly so confusing that almost the entire jury assumed that Hairston-Bassette’s motive was known, but the evidence was excluded (or was in Antoine Ford’s testimony, of which more later). But, when we got to ask the lawyers questions after the trial, we asked the prosecution what Hairston-Bassette’s motive was, and the prosecution said he was also mystified. So.

Jury Selection

I was really excited to get to be on a jury. I wanted to participate in my civic duty. I’d read extensively about forensic science, and I was hopeful that I’d be able to put my knowledge into practice to bring about justice. Most people, uh, did not share my level of enthusiasm.

No one (except me) wants to be on a jury, but people are strangely unagentic about not being on the jury. Eighty percent of the conversations I witnessed during jury selection were something like:

Lawyer: So you say here on your jury questionnaire that a police officer once stole your car, ran over your cat, and crashed it into your living room, while singing a song of her own invention, You Are Stupid And Ugly And That’s Why I’m Doing This, Also, I Can Get Away With It Because I’m A Cop.
Person: Yes, that’s right.
Lawyer: Would you say that that means you’re biased against police officers?
Person: Well, I mean, anyone would be in that situation.
Lawyer: Can you set aside your biases and strive to be impartial?
Person: I know that jury trials are important to ensure justice, so I’ll try.

And then they ended up on the jury.

There is an obvious solution to this problem! Don’t say “I’ll try”! Say that you’re definitely biased against cops and you would assume everything they said is false because they said it! Use a little strategy.

One person actually did follow my advice here. Sort of. He said that he had worked as a security guard, and when he was breaking up fights had learned that it was always “certain people” who got into fights and that he could tell the defendant was one of those “certain people.” When pressed by the judge, he refused to specify what those “certain people” were. Hairston-Bassette was silent and dressed professionally;⁵ the only piece of visual information that could possibly indicate that he was a troublemaker was that he was black. The judge struck that guy from the jury.

I had looked forward to the jury as a chance to look at a random cross-section of society. Random people in Alameda County are nerds. My jury had two lawyers, a student studying aerospace engineering, a lawyer-turned-philosophy professor, a startup founder, a guy reading A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, and a Thing of Things reader.⁶ The effects of gentrification, I guess. Maybe all of the service workers live in the suburbs?

Neither the defense nor the prosecution struck the lawyers, even though I’d been told by a bunch of people that no one ever lets lawyers on a jury.

Random people in Alameda County are also fully based and ACABpilled. I think probably a third of the people questioned were asked something like “you said in your jury questionnaire that ‘all cops are lying bastards and I hate them.’ Can you elaborate for us on what that means?” And they didn’t ask me anything like that, so this metric clearly underestimates the number of people in Alameda County who fucking hate cops. My people!

In general, I felt that the court system could benefit from some understanding of Bayesian epistemology. The judge kept instructing people that they should judge each police officer as an individual, because one cop being a bad apple doesn’t have anything to do with whether a completely different cop is a good apple. In my head, I was like “my prior is that cops lie, fabricate evidence, and violate people’s civil liberties. Obviously, an individual cop can overcome that prior—my prior isn’t that strongly held. But I think it makes sense to have priors about people’s character. You can, in fact, infer things about people from the groups they freely choose to be in.”

However, no one asked me about it because I am apparently in the bottom 67th percentile of Alameda County residents for cop-hating, so I was saved from having to explain my views on statistical reasoning to the judge.

Also, they went on and on and on about the presumption of innocence, and I was just like “yeah, yeah, my prior has to be that this guy is innocent, can we move on now?”

As a Quaker, I’m not supposed to take oaths. But we all took oaths as a group and there wasn’t any obvious point at which I could interrupt to say that I would prefer to affirm this statement, actually. I wasn’t even sure whether I was taking any oaths. They just asked me to say that I understood and agreed to various things? I’m pretty sure Quakers are allowed to say they understand and agree to things? I should have looked this up after the first day, when I got discombobulated and maybe took an oath not to lie on my jury questionnaire, but I didn’t. Oops.

I had planned, if I got on the jury, to study up on forensic science—specifically, why none of it is reliable. I wanted to have studies and citations and experts ready to go. “Ballistics is pseudoscience!” I would say. “Eyewitness testimony is unreliable! People are regularly coerced into confessions!”

Unfortunately, I discovered at the jury selection, jurors aren’t allowed to do their own research. You’re allowed to use your preexisting knowledge, and you’re allowed to use the testimony of the expert witnesses, but you’re not allowed to independently learn about the law, evidence collection techniques, the crime scene, or anything like that.

I puzzled over whether I should follow this instruction. It was clearly intended for stupid people whose research would discover sovereign citizen bullshit. I was an intelligent, informed individual who had just mistakenly believed I would be able to Google “toolmark evidence untrustworthy Radley Balko” whenever I needed to.

Ultimately, I decided against for two reasons. One, I’m a Quaker, and Quakers aren’t supposed to tell lies, and I’m pretty rubbish at being a Quaker⁷ but I figured that lying under oath solemn affirmation was going beyond merely being rubbish. Two, my skepticism of the criminal justice system ultimately comes from my faith in what it could be. I believe that it is better for ten wrongdoers to go free than for one innocent person to suffer. I believe in civil liberties and the rule of law. I believe in the government tying its hands, even when it has the best imaginable reasons to not, because—just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

I was trusting everyone else here to do their jobs: the witnesses, to say what they believed; the judge, to adjudicate disputes fairly and tell us the law accurately; the prosecutor, to pursue truth; the defense, to be as slimy and disingenuous a bastard as is necessary to set the defendant free. I figured that, as long as I thought the system was legitimate at all—and I do—I had to do mine to the best of my ability. So they told me not to research, and I didn’t.

The Trial

In an act of sheer writerphobia and systematic oppression of bloggers, you’re not allowed to remove your notes on a jury case from the courtroom. Even once the case ends, they take your notebook and destroy it. So every break, I rushed to my laptop—mind full of contraband knowledge—and scribbled down as much as I could remember.

Fortunately for me, we had a lot of breaks. In principle, we were on duty from 9:30am to 4:30pm, with a fifteen-minute break in the morning and afternoon and a lunch break of an hour and a half. In practice, we always started after 9:30—sometimes well after—and I began to feel disappointed when it was 4:15 and the witness was still talking.

The lawyers had longer days. Indeed, the jury’s early releases and late calls were often preceded by lawyers asking to “approach the bench,” a term which here means “have a secret meeting that the jury isn’t allowed to know anything about.” I assume that we were released early to allow the lawyers more time to get up to shenanigans.

And the lawyers were clearly up to shenanigans. If the breaks weren’t enough, such bench approaches were sometimes followed with the witnesses being switched out and the judge telling us that witness switches are perfectly normal and caused only by schedule constraints. Nothing is more suspicious than being told that something is perfectly normal.

We had other signs that something was Up. The defense attorney established several people’s connections to a police officer named Samson Liu. I scribbled “foreshadowing!” in my notes. Unfortunately, at no point did it come up who Samson Liu actually was. When I Googled him afterward, it turned out that he had illegally searched Bomani Hairston-Bassette’s car. Presumably his evidence was excluded because of one of those secret meetings.

But the biggest shenanigan was Antoine Ford, Wright’s bodyguard and friend who shot Hairston-Bassette. He was called to testify and indeed was the prosecution’s star witness. But when he was called to the stand, all he said was “I'm not going to say anything.” The judge repeatedly threatened him with contempt of court; he continued to refuse to testify. Finally, Ford was dismissed, his testimony was stricken, and we were told to forget anything he said. The jury joked that we had no idea how we’d remember it! Whatever the prosecution wanted to establish with Ford’s testimony, it didn’t have the opportunity.

Unfortunately, Googling afterward didn’t explain to me why Antoine Ford was so uncooperative. If my best friend were murdered, I’d want his killer to be in prison. Maybe he was really mad about being subsequently arrested for illegally owning a gun?⁸

I had a lot of time to speculate about Shenanigans, because being in the jury on a murder trial is very boring.

You’re not supposed to change your beliefs based on anything the lawyers say. The court goes so far as to ban you from taking notes on the opening statements, for fear you’ll take the opening statements as evidence. The lawyers have figured out a way around this restriction: they phrase all their questions to witnesses as “[statement the lawyer wants to say], correct?” I was conscientious about not adding a statement to my notes if the witness responded with “I’m not sure” instead of “yes.” I don’t think everyone else was.

The only way to get a piece of visual evidence into the court record is for the lawyer to say “[description of what the visual evidence looks like], correct?” and the witness to answer “yes.” So about a third of the trial consists of lengthy verbal descriptions of photos that we’re all looking at.

For each piece of evidence, the lawyer has to ask the witness what the best practices are for collecting the piece of evidence, whether each best practice was followed, and the complete chain of custody for each piece of evidence. This takes up another third of the trial time, and was colossally boring except once when the witness forgot what evidence #5 was. (We’ve all been there.)

I understand that this process is important: the defense has to be able to challenge sloppily collected evidence or evidence that could have been tampered with. But I think the prosecution and defense could approach the bench and figure out if there’s any dispute about whether a piece of evidence was properly collected. If there isn’t, maybe the prosecution could just say “this evidence was collected according to best practices and had a clean chain of custody, correct?” and move on.

Technology has changed everything about court. I don’t know how lawyers used to present evidence; today, they use PowerPoints (which occasionally break). Very little of the evidence in this case would have existed twenty years ago: Instagram posts; ShotSpotter; Nest cameras. Even security camera footage is much better than it used to be. You can recognize faces and see that someone is holding a gun.⁹

Occasional moments of interest emerged when I was trying desperately to remember whether various kinds of forensic science were pseudoscience or not. While the prosecution was saying ‘and this is a picture of the car that you saw on the scene, correct?’ for the third hour in a row, I racked my brain, trying to remember anything I’d read about ShotSpotter, communing with the Great Spirit of Radley Balko in the hopes that some of his divine knowledge would miraculously pass to me and I’d know whether medical examiners can tell whether someone was shot in the back of the hand or the front of the hand.

(The NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund says that ShotSpotter has a high rate of false positives and false negatives, but as far as I can tell the way it was used in this trial was appropriate. I still don’t know about the hand thing.)

None of the forensic science debunking I remembered was in this case at all. If a man is shot multiple times in the back, even the stupidest medical examiner can identify the cause of death. The only eyewitness was too hostile to testify, and anyway Hairston-Bassette was identified with DNA. There were no bitemarks, no toolmarks, no forensic hair analysis.

I learned from the opening statement that Hairston-Bassette lied to the police, and I thought at least I’d get to use my knowledge of how police coerce people while interviewing them. “No wonder he lied,” I would say, “see how the police are leaning on him.” Unfortunately for my sense of usefulness, although fortunately for the cause of justice, Hairston-Bassette’s interview was conducted ethically. I even recognized several of the techniques from my motivational interviewing textbook.

Eventually, the prosecution called a ballistics expert, and the defense attorney got up and said something like “according to the National Academy of Sciences’s 2009 report on forensic science, your entire field is complete bullshit, right?” So I figured that I could at least trust the defense, and stopped worrying about whether autopsies have passed an RCT.

And then! And then! The defense called its own “ballistics expert,” who was a private investigator with no training in ballistics, and who drew lines on surveillance video stills in Paint to show that the bullets from Hairston-Bassette’s gun couldn’t possibly have shot Wright. Even though bullets move in three dimensions and you can’t predict the movement of a three-dimensional object by drawing a line on a two-dimensional video still. So I could no longer trust the defense, and it was me and the disembodied spirit of Radley Balko, alone in the world.

I thought I might at least be useful pointing out that the defense’s ballistics expert was nonsense. But the entire jury agreed it was complete bullshit, and “let me just draw a line on this video—” became a running joke. After the trial, we told the defense lawyer to never hire that guy again.

The defense lawyer made another questionable witness choice that freed me from alternating boredom and frantic attempts to pass my Knowledge (ShotSpotter) check. He called Donté Clark, a poet and mentor to at-risk youth. I think it was supposed to establish something about the culture of violence among young black men in Oakland. Instead, I spent Clark’s entire testimony going “wait, your job is helping youth achieve financial stability through poetry? Has anyone achieved financial stability through poetry since 1923? Your other job is making deliveries for Amazon and Instacart, surely that implies something about the tractability of financial security through poetry.”

The entire process felt like a live-action roleplaying game, although a live-action roleplaying game would have much better pacing. It didn’t seem real to me that I had a person’s actual life in my hands. Multiple people, actually: both Hairston-Bassette and the people he might kill if he were a murderer and walked free. I’m just a guy. I spent the first day of the trial with my shirt inside-out because my husband was still asleep and I had to dress in the dark. And I was sitting here, drawing labyrinths on my notebook, listening to a lawyer say “and then you put the sticker on evidence bag #3, correct?”, and if I fucked up someone would be unjustly imprisoned or murdered.

I spend a lot of time playing games and writing stories in which I pretend to do serious, important things. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that, when it comes time to do something that’s actually serious and important, it also feels like pretend.

No one told real life that gunshots were supposed to sound realistic. On the Nest camera, they sound almost embarrassingly fake—like someone is hitting a trash can with a stick.

I’m emphasizing the boredom a lot here, and it was my dominant emotional experience of the trial. But, like a combat soldier, a jury member’s boredom is interspersed with moments of sheer terror.

I was increasingly conscious, over the course of the trial, that the lawyers and nearly all of the jury were white or Asian, and that the defendant, the victim, the eyewitnesses, and most of the cops were black or Latino. It felt like there was a parallel world of violence, existing alongside my own.¹⁰ The people who kill each other, and the people who catch them, are separated out from me by the color of their skin. I’m never afraid of violence; I walk down Brockhurst Street without fear. Our worlds only intersect when I’m asked to sit in judgment.

In order to convince you that the defendant committed the crime, the prosecution has to include a lot of incidental information that establishes that the defendant is a person. Hairston-Bassette worked for Facebook as a dishwasher, but he was building his own business as a clothes designer. He likes the film Rush Hour. He has a grandmother. He is dating casually, but not in a committed relationship. He is nicknamed “Nook,” and I don’t know if that means he likes Animal Crossing or used to hide in corners or what.

Bomani Hairston-Bassette was an idiot. I mentioned earlier that he lied to the police? The police asked to speak to him while he was in prison. He didn’t request a lawyer or invoke his right to remain silent, in spite of receiving no pressure other than a polite question. The police asked him why he left his car running. He said—I’m not joking—that he always left his car running when he went for walks, because he had Farmers, which is really good car insurance.

The first time I heard the interview, I wanted to slam my face into a notebook.

The defense pointed out that he was on opiates for pain relief during the interview, which perhaps made his behavior more understandable.

Hairston-Bassette also placed a call out from the jail—a call he knew was recorded—in which he said that he liked lying and was very good at it. But the defense pointed out that many people say something ill-advised at some point; a young man’s bravado is not evidence that he’s a heartless murderer.

What is less understandable is Bomani Hairston-Bassette’s decision to take the stand to testify in his own defense. The defense story that I mentioned in the first section all comes straight from Hairston-Bassette’s testimony. I don’t understand why Hairston-Bassette decided to provide us with such an obviously implausible series of events, or why the defense thought it was a good idea to open up the chance for the prosecution to hammer him about all the lying.

On the day of the murder, Hairston-Bassette fled the crime scene, bleeding from two gunshot wounds, and found his friend Lester Stanley, who was working at a nearby hotel. Stanley dropped everything to race his friend to the hospital, saving his life. The timestamps on various surveillance videos suggest that he was driving at nearly a hundred miles an hour. Stanley allowed police to search his car and was very cooperative; as far as I can tell, he thought that Hairston-Bassette was the victim, not a potential perpetrator.

Stanley was called by the prosecution to give testimony at the trial. The prosecution asked whether the defendant was Bomani Hairston-Bassette. Stanley and Hairston-Bassette both laughed, and Stanley commented that he should know who Hairston-Bassette was; they were like brothers. The defense said that they stipulated that the defendant was Hairston-Bassette and the prosecution didn’t have to establish it. The moment was sweet and humanizing. They liked each other. They were friends.

Murderers have friends, of course. Complete social isolation isn’t a prerequisite for murder. It doesn’t mean he’s innocent. But it does mean he’s a person.

Stanley was visibly crying as he testified. He had done an act of heroism to save his best friend’s life. Now he was giving testimony that might put his best friend in prison for the rest of his life.

Hairston-Bassette killed someone; perhaps he deserves to be in prison. But there’s no way to only harm the perpetrator. Lester Stanley—from what little I knew of him—didn’t deserve to be punished. But he was punished just the same, torn apart from a man who was like a brother to him, forced by the law to help destroy his best friend’s life. Hairston-Bassette had friends, and a grandma, and the whole fabric of a life, and even if Hairston-Bassette deserved to be punished none of them did.

I know that Wright too likely had friends and a family and all the rest, which didn’t come up in the trial. I tried not to sympathize more with the person I could see than with the person I couldn’t. But—I wasn’t ordering something bad to happen to some faceless person, some statistic that shows that a murder conviction deters 0.2 murders and prevents 0.9 through incapacitation. I was ordering something bad to happen to a man who was in front of me, whom I made eye contact with every time I left the jury room. Someone who liked Rush Hour and maybe Animal Crossing. Someone who did fucking fiber arts.

And I know it doesn’t matter, none of this matters, we can’t refuse to punish people because they’re people or it would make a mockery of the entire justice system, but—I do wonder how many people would still be tough on crime if they had to look every one of the criminals in the face.

The Deliberation

And then the alternates were dismissed and the rest of us were all put in a room together to decide Bomani Hairston-Bassette’s fate.

When I was in the trial, I was puzzled by the epistemic tangle the jury instructions were putting us in. How could I possibly be sure I wasn’t changing my opinion based on struck testimony? I couldn’t just not know something. There were also a number of jury instructions where the court had no way of verifying I was following them. They couldn’t tell whether I was voting based on whether I thought the punishment was just, or whether I’d fact-checked the forensic science.

When I did jury deliberations, I understood. These instructions weren’t really telling me to engage in impossible intellectual contortions; they were governing what kind of arguments I was allowed to make in the jury room. No one could stop me from making inferences from Antoine Ford’s behavior, but if I told my inferences to anyone else they’d tell me I should stop because it was against the rules. Similarly, if someone tried to make arguments for jury nullification or to pull out their phones to fact-check something, the other jurors would ignore them. Even if no individual is following all the rules, jury deliberations are an epistemic process, and it matters a lot what arguments people are allowed to make.

We quickly (over the course of the first day) developed a consensus around the story I outlined in the first section. As a result, we soon found him guilty on the charge of being a felon¹¹ in possession of a firearm. Technically, in California, a felon is allowed to possess a firearm temporarily for self-defense, if they didn’t intend to have it and discarded it as soon as they were no longer in danger. However, it seemed clear to us that, beyond a reasonable doubt, Hairston-Bassette carried a firearm to the scene, held on to the firearm as he fled, or both.

Without much more trouble, we found Hairston-Bassette not guilty of murder in the first degree. Murder in the first degree requires premeditation: that is, you have to have decided ahead of time, with careful planning and deliberation, that you intended to commit murder. If Hairston-Bassette had intended to commit murder ahead of time, we decided, he could have shot Wright while he was approaching Wright and been much safer from Antoine Ford. For that matter, he could have not walked between the cars to the place where Antoine Ford had a clean line of sight to shoot him.

I and several other jurors made the argument that it was not obvious that Hairston-Bassette had ever done anything with careful planning and deliberation in his life. He not only spoke to the police without his lawyer present, but also told an obvious lie. And he took the stand to testify in his own defense, even though everyone knows you’re not supposed to do that and his lawyer no doubt advised him against it. In conclusion, Hairston-Bassette was a dumbass and absolutely could have committed this murder on impulse because he was a dumbass.

I’ve never seen anyone say “actually, it’s a good idea to lie to police officers because it will make the jury think you’re too stupid to commit premeditated murder,” but it did work in this case. Maybe this is the new murder meta.

The next question we faced was murder versus manslaughter. Under California law, a murder becomes manslaughter if one of several meliorating criteria holds. For example, “imperfect self-defense” occurs if someone sincerely believes that they need to use force in self-defense, but is incorrect about whether it’s justified.

The criteria that came up in this case was “heat of passion.” Heat of passion occurs when the victim said or did something so horrible that a reasonable person would fly into a passion and lose control of their actions. For example, if you catch someone molesting your child and kill them, that would be manslaughter because of the heat of passion defense.

Of the twelve people on the jury, nine (including me) thought this was obviously not a heat of passion situation. We know what Bomani Hairston-Bassette said happened, and a reasonable person wouldn’t fly into a passion about being asked whether they want to buy drugs. It’s impossible to imagine what the fuck a stranger could say to you over the course of twenty seconds that would cause you to fly into a rage that justifies a homicide.

Of the remaining, one wanted to vote for manslaughter because he had a moral objection to the length of murder sentences. (He actually told everyone how long murder sentences are; there was a long awkward silence, because everyone knew we weren’t supposed to know, and then we moved on. Jury instructions work!) One was indecisive but ultimately joined the side that believed it was murder. And one was a Kantian.

I have learned why they don’t let philosophy professors on juries.

The Kantian felt that, while it was more likely than not that Bomani Hairston-Bassette committed murder and not manslaughter, no one had asked the Kantian whether it was more likely than not. They had asked whether it was true beyond a reasonable doubt. And this motive was so mysterious that the Kantian felt he couldn’t know for really sure that Charles Wright hadn’t said something so outlandish that Bomani had flown into a fit of passion.

This was, uh, really frustrating to argue with.

Us: Can you think of an example of some words a stranger could say that would make a reasonable person fly into a passion and kill someone?
Kantian: No, not really.

Us: If Wright said something that would make a reasonable person fly into a passion, why wouldn’t Bomani say that on the witness stand?
Kantian: I have no idea.

Us: Your proposed narrative of the crime makes no sense based on everything we know about human psychology.
Kantian: I agree.

There is a certain kind of terrible argument on the Internet, the kind where you’re arguing with someone you’ve been arguing with for years. You know every point they’re going to make; they know every point you’re going to make. Nothing new has been said for months. And yet there’s something compulsive about it, an itch in your mind that you can’t help but scratch, something that eats up afternoons. This time it’ll be different, you say to yourself. This time I might convince them. If I just make the point in different words… if I have one more damning piece of evidence, one more clever turn of phrase, I’ll win.

Being on a hung jury is like that, except that the importance and urgency of the argument isnt’ a distorted thought. If you convince them, you might all get to leave.

It took us one day to reach consensus on Yes Gun No Murder One, and then we argued with the Kantian. Someone dropped out and we got an alternate. We took half a day to reach consensus this time because we already knew all the arguments. And then there was nothing to do to run out the clock.

We had a number of days off: the judge went on vacation, the court was closed, some mysterious business we didn’t understand was conducted. We only argued about three days out of five. To some extent this was good (I had work to do). To some extent it only prolonged the agony.

I proposed that we should all go work or read or browse social media on our laptops and just let the time pass until the judge agreed the jury was hung, but no one listened to me.

One time, we got called into the judge’s chambers and asked if we were hung. Eleven out of the twelve jurors said yes. The Kantian said that he felt that with a bit more argument he might be convinceable. I gained a new understanding of what drives people to commit heat-of-passion manslaughter.

I mean, now that I have my life back, I admire his principles. At the time, I felt nothing but rage.

Our torment ended, but not because of the mercy of the Kantian or the judge. We weren’t allowed to say what charges we were conflicted on, but we could say “we found him not guilty of one charge, guilty of one charge, and are undecided about two other charges.” The only way this could possibly happen is if we were going to find him guilty of either murder in the second degree or manslaughter. Hairson-Bassette realized that, no doubt realized he was unlikely to get a Kantian philosophy professor on his next jury, and pled to manslaughter.

I… am happy about this? I agree that the sentence for second-degree murder—fifteen years to life in prison—was far too long for this crime. Bomani was ultimately sentenced to ten years in prison, which seems right to me. If I were less principled, or maybe a different kind of principled, I would have joined my fellow juror and voted for manslaughter because murder sentences are too long.

I followed the law, and a just outcome ultimately happened. But it does bother me that these two facts had nothing to do with each other.

Conclusions

So, what did I learn from my experiences as a jury member on a murder trial?

I was genuinely impressed by the professionalism of everyone involved in the trial: the judge, the lawyers, the police officers, the witnesses.¹² The news often covers the justice system when it’s behaving badly; the Hairston-Bassette trial showed me that the justice system (even in Oakland) often behaves well. Admittedly, the evidence obtained in an illegal search was excluded, which skews my estimate of how professional everyone was. But the news article still said “someone illegally searched Hairston-Bassette’s car” and left out the dozens of people who did their jobs well.

I was also impressed by the professionalism of the jury. My fellow jury members were thoughtful, intelligent, morally serious people who were conscious of their responsibility as jurors.¹³ Even given how frustrating the experience was, I was impressed by their rationality, how closely they stuck to the evidence, and their determination to follow the norms of good discourse. Sometimes I see people say online “you elites in your epistemic bubbles have no idea how stupid normal people are.” But judging from my jury-trial experience, normal people are actually pretty smart! At least in Alameda County.

While I’m listing off things I’m impressed by: murder law is great! The jury instructions I received were the product of literal centuries of careful thought about morality and culpability. It was honed by thousands of real situations, not just armchair contemplation. It showed.

Although I have always believed in the importance of jury trials, my trial experience drove home their importance. This trial had a lot at stake: decades of Hairston-Bassette’s life, the lives of his potential future victims. The jury system gives the general public the final say. How likely is it that someone weighed the consequences of their actions before they pulled the trigger? What provocations are severe enough to drive a reasonable person to murder? I am proud of my country that these questions are answered by ordinary people using their common-sense moral intuitions, instead of by judges who could drift arbitrarily far away from the general ethical consensus.

I have become convinced of the absolute necessity of mass surveillance. If we didn’t have access to the video recording of Hairston-Bassette committing homicide, he probably would have been found not guilty for reasons of self-defense—and would have been in a position to kill someone else. I understand that there are serious civil liberties concerns regarding mass surveillance and I wouldn’t want the government to have cameras it can look at whenever it wants, even if it has no reason to suspect a crime. But I think it’s good for private citizens to have their own surveillance cameras, which the government can access with probable cause and a warrant.

Similarly, I am convinced of the necessity of gun control. It wasn’t necessary for the conflict between Hairston-Bassette and Wright to escalate to murder. If Hairston-Bassette hadn’t had access to an illegal gun, they would have had a fistfight, and Charles Wright would probably still be alive. It is unconscionable that impulsive, violent people carry weapons that allow them to trivially escalate any situation into murder. I don’t think that we should take guns from law-abiding, responsible gun owners; American culture is, for better or for worse, a gun culture. And I’m sympathetic to the desire of many felons in Oakland to carry a gun for self-defense. But ultimately, if the courts have taken away someone’s right to carry a gun, we have to have laws that mean that they can’t get a gun.

This crime was stupid. True crime and fictional murder mysteries tend to select for interesting crimes: glamorous villains, clever plots, and motivations that are rooted in someone’s backstory and speak to deep truths of the human condition. Bomani Hairston-Bassette, on the other hand, shot a guy for no reason in a situation where three minutes’ thought would show that committing homicide advanced none of his goals. But he didn’t think for three minutes. The entire crime, from approaching Wright to fleeing the scene, took about ninety seconds.

I don’t know how many crimes are stupid. I haven’t seen any data. But I do think we underestimate the prevalence of stupid crimes, because no one writes about them. Dumb people, mostly young men, making dumb choices because they weren’t thinking, and now someone’s dead.

I like the justice system, I like surveillance, I like gun control, you might think that I’m turning into a pro-cop bootlicker. But fundamentally I do agree that sentences are too long. I just can’t see any way that it’s just to imprison someone for twenty years—much less life—for a ninety-second decision.

Of course, no matter how brief Hairston-Bassette’s mistake was, the effects on Charles Wright and his loved ones will last forever. I agree that Hairston-Bassette ought to be put away where he can’t hurt anyone until he grows up enough to think about his actions. But we know that violence is a young man’s game. Will Hairston-Bassette still commit murder when he’s thirty-five? Fifty-five? The evidence, I think, says no.

Then we are left with vengeance and deterrence. I don’t think Hairston-Bassette could have been deterred: his crime was too dumb. And while I do have vengeful instincts—ask me about my thoughts on the attempted cancellation of PEPFAR sometime—I have them about decisions people made intentionally and with forethought. Ninety seconds is such a short time. I can’t hold any decision against you if you made it in ninety seconds.

(If you read at an average speed, it took you about 90 seconds to read from “I don’t know how many crimes are stupid” to here.)

I understand prison abolitionists better now. This crime is so dumb. It feels like it can’t be necessary. It feels like if we just did something better, then Hairston-Bassette would have made better choices. If he’d had a better job, or a better education, or more social support, or cognitive-behavioral therapy to help him control his anger, or something, then he would just not make an impulsive choice that leaves someone dead.

I do think many such crimes are preventable, although often in a way that involves funding the police. Gun control, as I said. Beat policing: sending cops to patrol high-crime areas reduces the crime rate, without simply displacing crimes to unpoliced areas. Putting out violent movies that distract people from committing violence; I think highly addictive first-person shooters have even higher potential as an anti-violence intervention. Even cognitive behavioral therapy: some anti-crime cognitive-behavioral therapy programs show impressive results in RCTs. But ultimately the problem is that some young men are stupid and violent and make stupid, violent choices. The best we can do is try to keep them from doing irreversible harm until they grow up enough to stop.

I feel sad about this murder. I feel sad for Charles Wright and his loved ones, for Antoine Ford and his loved ones, for Bomani Hairston-Bassette and his grandmother and Lester Stanley. There is no satisfaction here from justice served and wrongs righted. There is only grief. Hairston-Bassette destroyed two lives when he took out his gun that day: Charles Wright’s and his own.

1. As shown by the police’s bodycam videos when they went to investigate the car. The surveillance video wasn’t high enough quality to see that.

2. I don’t want to pay for a trial transcript, so exact numbers are coming from my memory; I could easily have gotten details wrong. The thrust of the situation is correct.

3. This is a conservative assumption. People were clearly trying to shoot each other after the muzzle flash.

4. Being on this trial definitely made me more nervous about walking on Brockhurst though.

5. I’m not actually sure whether it was a prison uniform or a desperate attempt at respectable clothing.

6. Hi!

7. For one thing, I maybe accidentally took an oath out of social awkwardness.

8. The defense pointed out Ford had kept his gun in his laundry basket, easily accessible by his three minor children. I thought it was really funny that the defense smeared the prosecution’s witness by calling him an irresponsible gun owner.

9. Is it too optimistic to hope that new technology will displace pseudoscientific forensic science?

10. Here I want to reference The City & The City but I suspect very few of you read Miéville. Sad!

11. No one told us what Bomani Hairston-Bassette’s felony conviction was for and I haven’t been able to find it online.

12. Except the guy who drew lines on video stills.

13. With one exception, whom I haven’t talked about because I don’t like saying mean things about private figures on a blog this big.