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September 30, 2020 37 mins

In the Season finale of Sworn, Phil looks back on the people we’ve met and asks them the same question. What does Justice look like to you?

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:03):
If you will place your left hand on the Bible
and raise your right hand, and please repeat after me
and I do solemnly swear, then titled action find the
defendant guilty of the time. It makes no sense, it
doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you must equit. We
all took the same of the office. We are all
bound by that common commitment to support and defend the Constitution,

(00:26):
to bear true faith and allegiance to the same that
you faithfully discharge the duties of our office. Do you
solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you are about
to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth. From Tenderfoot TV and I Heart Radio,
this is Sworn. I'm your host Philip Holloway. I viewed

(00:53):
justice as being a collection of people assesses any laws
that has to be executed by human beings. Until we
can remove the human being aspect out of it. We're
not going to have perfection, But it is my hope,

(01:16):
my desire, my dream, if you will that we continue
to evolve. Technology evolves, our way of thinking evolves, crime
fighting tools evolved. A lot of people in society believe
they may not have anything to contribute to our legal

(01:36):
system because they're not attorneys, they're not police, they're not
district attorneys. But we as citizens all play a role.
So what I would like to tell the general public
is that when you sit on a jury, please take
it seriously. A lot of the compics will tell you
never trust your life. The twelve People wants smart enough

(02:01):
to get off of Jerry. They're wrong. Jerry duty serious business.
Jerry duty can save an innocent person from being incarcerated.
Jerry duty can punish derightfully guilty. Please take Jerry Duty seriously.

(02:30):
Welcome to the season finale of Sworn. We have been
extremely fortunate to talk to some amazing people this season,
and everything has centered around one central question. What is justice.
This may sound like a simple question, but it's not
a question that can easily be answered in absolute terms.

(02:52):
In this episode, we're going to look back to the
people who have shared their stories and their expertise with us,
and from each of their unique person actives, we will
do our best to tell you what justice really is.
We'll start with the exonorees we spoke to early in
the season. They know personally what it feels like to

(03:13):
be denied justice. At the beginning of the episode, you
heard from Joe Diaz, the man from the Eyewitness Testimony episode.
Joe was wrongfully convicted and served eight years for a
sexual assault he did not commit. The next voice is
William Dylon. William is from our episode on Polygraphs and

(03:36):
sent Dogs, who was wrongfully incarcerated for twenty seven years
for a murder he did not commit. Justice means truth,
that's all it means. It doesn't mean getting something for something.
Justice only means truth to me. This is Bill Richards

(03:56):
from the Bite Marks episode. Bill sir twenty three years
in a California prison after he found his wife murdered.
Police still have not found the real killer. Justice to
me would be punishing the people who did to me,
because it would stop him from doing it to other people.

(04:17):
It's not that I'm bengeful, It's just that the only
way to stoft people is to see justice, and then
justice would be if they actually went after I found
who did this to my wife. But justice would be
punishing the right person and stopping people doing this like
what happened to me. I don't believe any person went

(04:37):
to prison who was innocent without some kind of misconduct
and that needs to be stopped. And the way to
stop that is you need to punish the people doing
it so the next guy doesn't do it. Lastly, we
have Calvin Johnson from the episode on racial bias. Calvin,
who is an African American was convicted by an all
whiet jury and wrongfully served sixteen year of a life sentence.

(05:02):
But what was this justice being to me? Probably the
same thing everybody else said, just uf If the word
justice will actually taken into exact content as the way
it should be, it means fair, equal quality for all
human beings. The problem is is just the justice system itself.
It's not justice because of the flaws. Therefore, it's not

(05:26):
equal equality for all citizens. Its inequality for its citizens
based on who they may be. Lower income people that
don't have the money to have to be able to
fight against the justice system that has all the odds
and all the policies and procedures stacked up against you.

(05:47):
It's against uh, the minorities. So it's just when you
look at it like that, the word justice does not
being honored and portrayed or fulfilled to be the truth.
Just as the United States right now really doesn't exist
except for rare cases. During our episode on Calvin's case,

(06:10):
we spoke with Molly Palmer. Molly is an attorney and
board member of the Georgia Innocence Project. In our interview
with Molly, we told her how Calvin has answered this
question about justice, that justice is just us. She said
that kind of insight is common among the Axonorees she
works with. You know, one of the things in working

(06:34):
with Axonorees, you know, they're never better. They spend so
many years behind bars, and they emerge grateful and happy
to have whatever life they have left. And at the
same time, you know, I think that there there are
certain things that they say that really gets to the
heart of their experience. Calvin is so gracious and such

(06:55):
a lovely man, but that kind of statement is so
heavy because as what it's saying is, so long as
you have a wrongfully imprisoned man, a single one man
or woman, so long as there is one person that
the system has failed, it's not justice. It just can't be.
I believe that justice does not look for the guilty,

(07:19):
it looks for the innocent. This is Dr Joel Zibet
from our episode on lethal injection. Justice is something that
you need to test on the people you despise. Justice
is the thing that works for people that we hate
and that we can't stand. And justice is about the

(07:39):
fair distribution of the way that people are brought forth
to trial, of what their punishment should look like, of
how society should look. There is this problem in America
with too many people incarcerated. There's two point two million
people in this country are in prisons. We stand out
in civil societies to have this many people incarcerated, and

(08:03):
so there's a talk about trying to reduce incarceration rate
and trying to find alternatives. You know, it's interesting too
because it's complicated. I'll give you an example. Jesse Smollett
in Chicago. It's unclear what happened there. Something strange happened.
He seemed to be involved in it. Now the question
is to how to punish him. And so it turned

(08:23):
out that his punishment was to do community service of
some sort, which, if I think of it, seems perfectly
reasonable to me, Like what does it matter? Why should
a person like that go to prison? And yet people
are very outraged that he didn't go to prison, that
the district attorney, I think dropped the charges because some

(08:46):
other deal was made. And so I think that our
desire for what we think is justice, or the need
to incarcerate people, I think runs pretty deep in America
these days. And until we get over this need to
incarceraate everybody, I think that what really we would consider

(09:06):
to be a just society is still often the distance.
So to me, justice doesn't look like putting everybody in prison.
And I think also the justice requires telling the story
of the defense as well as the prosecution. The media
and television is fascinated by the stories of the prosecution,

(09:28):
and there's very little stories about the defense. I believe
that people should be innocent until proven guilty. I believe
that they should not be prejudged, and I think that
these are necessary parts of a just system. A just
system is open and honest and accountable and available. So
that's my view of justice. Here's Amelia Maxfield, a forensic

(09:54):
specialist for the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. From my specific stand point,
what justice means now is finality. Our system preferences the
resolution of cases over getting it right. That is written
in our case law, in our precedent. It's more important

(10:14):
for a case to be over then for the right
person to be in prison or even on death row,
or even executed for that crime. And I think that
plays out across the system in the pressure to plead
guilty to small misdemeanors in order to not inconvenience the
court by having a trial. Our system is just designed
to grind people through, from misdemeanor convictions to homicide cases.

(10:39):
We just want resolution, We just wanted to be over.
I don't believe that should be a principle of any
justice system. That may have made sense when we didn't
have DNA testing, when we didn't have evolving science, but
science inherently evolved, and if you're going to be using
evidence that changes and developed to secure conviction, you have
to be open into revisiting that conviction as the science

(11:02):
or the evidence changes and evolved. The justice system should
preference getting it right over having it resolved. I think
it should be much more important to be sure that
the evidence that's being used is reliable and valid and accurate,
rather than just securing a conviction and resolving a case

(11:23):
just to have it resolved. Here's Justin Brooks, the director
and co founder of the California Innocence Project, pointing out
how different economic factors can affect justice. Well, that's where
we start seeing the separation of rich from poor in
terms of getting the amount of justice you can afford.
The defense attorney can obviously ask the judge for those resources,

(11:47):
can petition to get those experts, but every county in
America has limits on that, and it will depend on
what the county budget is and how much they allocate
to experts, and whether the judge thinks you need it
or not. But those decisions is won't be left up
to you, the defendant if you're indigent, and a lot
of times your lawyer won't be able to get the
resources they need. What I've seen in California, which is interesting,

(12:10):
which I think is counterintuitive for most people, is that
almost all our exonerations came from cases where private lawyers
were handling the case that we're either appointed by the
court or retained, and very few cases where there were
public defenders. And I think it's because in public defender cases,
the public defenders have training, experience, supervisors, and probably most

(12:35):
importantly in my cases, access to investigators, where sometimes you
have private attorneys that are very small offices don't have
a lot of resources. The families come forward with all
the money they have, and it's still not enough to
put together a good defense, and so they might go
a little short on the investigation or retaining experts or

(12:55):
doing things like that, whereas public defenders offices often do
a better job on that. And I think the general
public thinks the opposite is true, that you're always better
with a private lawyer than you are a public defender.
And again I'm not saying there's not amazing private lawyers
out there with amazing law firms, and when they have
the right resources and people can compensate them, that they

(13:16):
aren't the best. But I think the problem is in
the middle. Where are you better off having a lawyer
without that much experience who as a private lawyer who
has no supervision and no investigators. Are you better off
getting a public offender to represent you? And I think
often when you don't have any resources, you're better off
with the public defender. The systems are so different county

(13:38):
to county. I worked as a quarter pointed lawyer in Michigan,
and I give you an example of a thing that
just denies people due process is when I did it
in Lansing, Michigan, I would get paid per case and
it was a flat fee. When I did it in
in Arbor, Michigan, I got paid by the hour. And
so if I took a case to trial in Lansing,

(14:00):
I would still get the same amount of money as
if I played it out, And if I took a
case to trial in ann Arbor, I would get paid
for all those trial hours. So what's going to happen
when people are running businesses and have to pay their
mortgage and pay for their kids schooling and all that.
We actually set a system up where it makes it
very difficult for lawyers to provide the same services. And

(14:22):
in California we have some of these crazy contracts out
in some of the smaller counties where one lawyer will
contract for the entire indigent defense work for the year
for the county. And now they're running a business that
gets a contract, and the more money they spend, the
less money they make on that contract. And this is

(14:42):
not good and it's it's crazy that within the same country,
with the same sixth Amendment the Federal Constitution, there's such
varying quality and resources on the defense side of the work.
And that's true not only just state to state, but
county by county within the same state. Because if what's
all about is getting the truth, and those resources will

(15:05):
assist the fact finder and getting to the truth, and
there should be no question about it. It shouldn't be
about well, he shouldn't get it. It should be about, well,
this best assist us in finding out the truth. It's
in all our best interests that innocent people aren't convicted
and that guilty people are and if providing additional resources
gets us there, it should happen. Here's retired judge and

(15:43):
lawyer Ray Gary Jr. Every county has their own, their
own idea of justice. For example, during my middle years
as a lawyer, Fulton County and cob Can Honey are
separated by a river. Fulton County was run by Democrats,

(16:06):
Cobb County was run by Republicans. I had a client
charged with a sex crime. Most of my cases were
in Cobb County, and I knew from experience he'd be
looking at ten years in prison, are going to trial
and taking his chance. But this case wasn't in Cobb County,

(16:27):
it was next door in Fulton County. The judge sent
a letter out and said we're bringing everybody in and
this will be your only chance to do a plea bargain.
If you don't do a polea burgain on this court date,
you're going to trial. So I got down there and
the prosecutor offered me to reduce it to a misdemeanor
and give him twelve months probation and not be a

(16:50):
sex offender. And I was thinking, this is too good
to be true. You know, from our perspective that if
this was in my Republican county and I live in,
you know, the best offer would have been twenty to
do ten be a lifestun sex offender. Because it happened
across the other side of the river, then it was

(17:10):
twelve months probation, no sex offender. We naturally jumped on
it and played guilty that very day. One funny thing
happened was I had charged my client ten thousand dollars
because I thought it was going to be a lot
more to it than that, and so he had paid
it in cash. The next day, after he played guilt,

(17:34):
didn't get out of jail, he called up and he said,
he said, listen, I gave you a lot of money
didn't you. I said, you sure did. I said that
was a lot of money. He said, you really didn't
have to do all that much. I said, that's true,
as it didn't. As it worked out, I really didn't
have to do a whole lot. He said, well, I
don't think I got my money's worth. I said, well,

(17:55):
you're in luck, I said, because the prosecutor is having
set at thoughts. She's wishing that she had never gave
you that deal. So I can go down there and
withdraw your plea and put you on the trial calendar
for Monday morning, first trial out, and we can we
can take this plea bargain off the table and have
your trial. And I said, a matter of fact, let

(18:16):
me put your on hole and I'll get my secretary
to get started on the motion and I can drive
down there, you know, this afternoon and foul it. He's
a hold up on that. Let me think about it.
And so I never heard back from him. But for everyone,
I came out smelling like a rose. There was ten
were I ended up being paid way too little. This

(18:37):
is defense attorney Michelle Tiegel on the idea of what
it means to win your case. I struggled with that.
When I first started doing criminal defense, I was an
athlete and I really wanted to win for all of
my clients. I had to redefine what winning means, and
I learned a lot about that from my former law

(18:58):
partner and kind of make me a little teary, because
as a criminal defense lawyer and also as a prosecutor,
we have to redefine what winning means. There were cases
where winning meant I had to be an advocate to
my client about taking what really was the best deal
and the best thing for their life. In some cases,

(19:21):
winning meant we fought to the very bitter end until
we got an acquittal, and we got it. In some
cases capital murder cases where the evidence was strong on
the state side and difficult to deal with, just preventing
a death sentence and getting life without parole was a win,

(19:41):
and that was a win that I struggled to wrap
my head around. But I had situations where just making
sure the state couldn't kill my client was a win.
And I would have never thought, starting as a baby
criminal defense lawyer, that a life without parole could go
in the win category. Glory, but winning is relative and

(20:02):
criminal practice and criminal law on both sides, and I
hope that from the prosecutor's side, and I know there
are prosecutors like this, that they will also start redefining
winning and that it will truly be based not just
on I'm going to get this conviction or I'm going
to advocate for this victim that is sometimes their role,

(20:24):
but that they're really going to just try to make
the right decision that serves the community and that does justice,
because that's what they're there to do. I think when
they lose sight of that, it creates a really dangerous system.
Here's Georgia prosecutor Jesse Evans. Justice means getting it right,
and we're all striving to get it right. It requires

(20:46):
that we act honorably. We try to act impartially trying
to get to the right fair results. So justice really
is about getting it right and about being fair. I
think that's the best way to find it. And as
long as we're acting honorably and we have the best
intentions within the criminal justice system, my experiences that we
usually get there, and they're rare instances where fairness is

(21:07):
not reached, where you have an outcome that seems unjust.
But I think those are more to the exception and
not the norm, and I think that's a product of
experience in time. A criminal justice system is not without
its flaws. I think we're always moving towards making it
better and open to the idea that we need to
be reflective. We need to be introspective from a criminal
justice perspective and say, are the ways of doing things

(21:29):
better to make sure that we get to that fairness,
to get to that right, results driven goal. This is
Ashley Wilcot, a lawyer who specializes in child welfare cases.
She's also a judge into cab County, Georgia. We last
heard from her in our episode on racial bias. Oh,
people are gonna hear this response and think, oh, she

(21:50):
lives in our own little world. But again, justice is blind.
There's a reason there's a blindfold on, lady. Justice. Justice
is blind. We have lost for a reason. We have crimes.
What what constitute a crime and how it's defined for
a reason in a perfect world, that's applicable to everyone equally.

(22:11):
In a perfect world, if you commit a crime, if
you violate a law, you're arrested, but you then face
a fair trial. You are presumed innocent. It doesn't matter
if there's a video of you doing it. You are
presumed innocent until it has proven in a court of law,
because I would keep in mind that a video that
you look at does not give you a three hundred

(22:32):
and sixty degree view. So you have to be convicted
by a jury of your peers or by a judge
if you choose to waive that. In a perfect world,
that process works the same for every individual, regardless of
their age, regardless of their color, regardless their gender or

(22:54):
gender identification. That's what justice is for me. This is
Federal judge jed Rakoff from New York. I have a
deep believer that just sense requires the judge to get
deeply into the facts, effects of the crime, the effects

(23:16):
of the criminal, effects of the victims, and to do
the very difficult and of an agonizing but careful job
of figuring out what sense makes sense when you factor
in those various opponents. The mandatory minimums, of course, prevent

(23:38):
you from doing that whatsoever. But even the sentencing guidelines
within the federal system are no longer mandatory, but they
might view are mistake because they emphasize certain factors, usually
in excess of other factors. So, for example, the sensing

(23:59):
guide lie as federal sentencing guidelines for drugs are vastly
dependent on the weight of the drugs that are sold,
and that means that if you have a large scale
narcotics conspiracy, even the lowest level person faces to huge

(24:21):
sense because the conspiracy as a whole distributed a lot
of drugs. This does not make sense to base. So
I would go back to the system that it persisted
in this nation for nearly two hundred years, which was
we leave it to the good sense of the judge,
and we encourage our judges to do a lot of

(24:42):
my work before they impose sense. Here's Kevin Ring, the
president of fam formally known as Families Against Mandatory Minimums.
So what we want to see is judges be allowed
to sentence again. We think judges need to have to
discretion to fashion punishments that fit the unique facts and

(25:03):
circumstances of each crime. Not every crime is the same,
not every defendant's the same. We don't want to see
people treated differently for reasons that aren't relevant, like grace
or gender or things like that. But we want people
who are more serious offenders to get longer punishments and
less serious offenders to get shorter punishments. And that sounds

(25:24):
so obvious and basic, but that's not the way the
system works. It's too much of a game now who
can plead first, who has more information to give up,
And so we have too many cases where low level
offenders are getting longer punishments because they don't have any information.
They can't give anybody up. We think the only way
to fix that is to get rid of mandatory sentences.

(25:45):
Let prosecutors bring what charges they want. They can make
their recommendations to the judge for what the sentence should
be based on the defendant's characteristics in the nature of
the crime. But we want judges to have control over
punishment again, so that it can be tailored to, you know,
what really happened, and not just some arbitrary standard that
was set by politicians who know nothing about this defendant

(26:07):
or this crime, but who wrote the mandatory minimum maybe
ten twenty years ago and couldn't have foreseen this particular instance.

(26:32):
This is my much better half, my wife, Natalie Holloway.
I might be a little biased here, but I like
her answer quite a bit. I think justice loves like fairness,
I think that's the best way off the cuff that
I can say that, And I think unfortunately that word

(26:53):
is not a simple definition, and so I think people
get caught up in what's right and what's wrong for
certain people. I believe in the bottom of my heart
that we also had the best for everybody, and everybody
is trying their best every day, and so fairness, fairness
is that what I best, what I think justice should be.

(27:16):
Here's defense attorney, actually merchant. I actually think the federal
government has a much better system than the state governments.
To the federal government, if you're arrested, you know, they've
got some evidence against you. It's a completely different system.
And in the state system, we arrest and then we
try and get the evidence, you know, like the confession

(27:36):
and things like that. I think that jurors need to
require more evidence to convict people. I think that they
need to actually require guilt beyond approved you know, beyond
a reasonable doubt to convict people. I think that's really
really important for us to have justice. I think that
obviously crime shouldn't happen, and guilty people should go to jail.
But I also think that there's oftentimes a reason and

(27:56):
like I said, truth always lies somewhere in the middle.
You know, maybe the person did something, but they didn't
do everything that they're accused of. I think that there's
a lot of power in the hands of prosecutors who
are oftentimes right out of law school, absolutely no perspective,
don't have kids, don't have a family, has never known
anybody accused of a criminal case. I think judges need

(28:19):
to have done both sides, I really do. I think
that that helps us get justice because if you've not
walked in my shoes and the prosecutors shoes, it's really
hard for you to judge us. And a lot of
times we see prosecutors on the bench, and defense lawyers
don't usually want to go on the bench, so that's
the problem. But it's hard because they have not walked
in our shats, and they haven't defended a person. They

(28:40):
haven't sat next to a person as a sob when
they're convicted, you know, and crying and saying I didn't
do this, and I'm going to spend the rest of
my life in jail hugging the mom who calls you
every day and says my son is innocent, and you
know he's in jail and feeling that. So I think
that if we can work towards a better system, that's justice.
But you know, I've a I don't want guilty people

(29:01):
to run around and be able to commit crimes. I mean,
I think that's awful, you know, But I also don't
want innocent people to be incarcerated. And I've always advocated
that we need to be smart on crime. I think
that programs work like these. We have accountability courts where
you know, drug court and dou I court and all
these different types of courts. I think that those are
really important because they're focusing on treatment. But the problem

(29:23):
I see with those is that it's just like anything,
we are kind of segregating classes of crime. We're saying,
if you are mentally ill and you commit a theft
type case, you can go to mental health court. But
if you smack your mom it's violent, you can't go.
You're mentally ill, you know you need the treatment. But
we're kind of segregating the types of classes and the

(29:45):
types of crimes, and I don't know that that necessarily
makes sense. I have made a career out of the
criminal justice system. I have worked my entire our adult
life in some capacity or another in the business of justice.
And even after all these years, I don't know that

(30:08):
I have a great answer to our question. You see,
the concept of justice, at its very core is subjective.
It will look differently depending on just where you're standing.
To some people, justice means punishing someone who has wronged them.
To others, it may mean mercy or forgiveness. On a

(30:30):
day to day basis. The justice that I work towards
means negotiating in good faith. It means both sides striving
for a fair outcome. Fairness is another esoteric word with
a meaning that escapes easy definition. But what fairness looks
like also changes from case to case. I have three

(30:52):
or four case files sitting right here on my desk
right now, and justice means something different in each and
every one of those case is It's fair to say
that I'm passionate about justice, after all, it is my
life's work. But I don't know that I am, or
that I should be more passionate about justice than anyone else.

(31:13):
It is in all of our interests to have a
system that works smoothly and is administered well. But I
think a lot of times we forget about empathy, about humility,
and about human decency. It is so easy to get
wrapped up in the idea of punishment or I foreign
eye justice, And that's why we wanted to tell these

(31:34):
stories this season. Until you go through an injustice, until
you inexperience an abuse of the system, it is easy
to focus on retribution. We idealize it. We see what
the media shows us. We hear about horrific crimes, and
we call for maximum retaliation. But our system is not perfect.

(31:55):
People are overcharged, people are taken from their families, People
are removed from society every day under the guise of
public safety. But is there not a greater threat with
the system that forgets individual humanity? What is safe, after all,
about a system that views people solely by their charges

(32:16):
and not by their individual unique circumstances. Our justice system
in America is light years ahead of many others around
the world. Most of the time, we get it right.
Most of the time the police arrest the right person.
But we so often overlooked that there are victims of

(32:37):
the system itself. Victims of crimes can be victims of
the system. Wrongfully accused persons are victims of the system.
Families of these people are also victims of the system,
and so is the community in so many instances. Every day,
in every case I work, I strive to do better

(32:59):
to find a better justice for my clients. Fortunately, I
also see so many people across the country advocating for
a better way, for a better criminal justice system, for
more fairness and sentencing, for better rehabilitation measures, for quicker
closure for victims. I hope that we've inspired you, perhaps

(33:20):
just a little bit, to think about the broader criminal
justice system. I hope that when you hear about cases,
perhaps like the ones we've talked about this season, that
you take a little bit of time and maybe think
just a little bit longer, and, as judges tell jurors,
take your responsibilities as a citizen seriously and keep an
open mind because things may just not be what they appear. Well,

(33:46):
that's enough from me for now. Let us know what
you thought about this new season of Sworn and our
new format. Give us a call with any criminal justice
questions you may have. Leave us a voice at four
zero four four one zero zero four for one, and
of course, feel free to reach out on social media

(34:08):
like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. If you reach out I'll
do my best to try to answer. We'll talk to
you soon here on Sworn. Sworn is a production of
Tenderfoot TV and I Heart Radio. Our lead producer is
Christina Dana. Executive producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright

(34:31):
for Tenderfoot TV, Matt Frederick and Alex Williams for I
Heart Radio, and myself Philip Holloway. Additional production by Trevor Young,
Mason Lindsay, Mike Rooney, Jamie Albright, and Halle Beadall original
music and sound designed by Makeup and Vanity Set. Our
theme song is Blood in the Water by Layup. Show

(34:53):
art and design is by Trevor Eisler, editing by Christina Dana,
Mixing and mastering by Mike Rooney and Cooper Skinner. Special
thanks to the team at I Heart Radio from U
t a or In Rosenbound and Grace Royer, Bryan Nord
and Matthew Papa from the Nord Group, BA Media and

(35:15):
Marketing and Station sixteen. I'd also like to extend a
very personal and special thanks to all of our contributors
and guests who have helped to make all of these
episodes possible. You can find sworn on Facebook, Twitter, and
Instagram at sworn podcast and follow me your host, Philip
Halloway on Twitter at phil Holloway e s Q. Our

(35:38):
website is sworn podcast dot com and you can check
out other Tenderfoot TV podcasts at www dot tenderfoot dot tv.
If you have questions or comments, you can email us
at Sworn at tenderfoot dot tv or leave us a
voicemail at four zero four for one zero zero four

(36:01):
four one. As always, thanks for listening. From your perspective,
How can our listeners be better jurors when they get summoned?
Besides finding people guilty, right, I think that the important
thing to understand is that we all want to find
jurors that are going to be fair, that are going
to be impartial to both sides. And those are sort

(36:24):
of the touchstone words that we use when we do
jury selection is are you gonna be fair? Are you
gonna be impartial? So the only thing that I would
encourage people to do is to keep an open mind
when you come into jury selection. I understand that we're
all different, we all have feelings that we're gonna bring
with us because of our own personal background when it
comes to the awesome responsibility of being a juror in

(36:46):
the case, just understanding that you're gonna have to check
some of that background baggage at the door and make
a decision based on the facts and evidence that is
presented in the courtroom. And even more important than that,
be open to the law that the judge is going
to give that juror as well. I think a lot
of people won't make the mistake of thinking, well, they're
only going to be looking at a given set of
facts and that's how the decision is going to be made,
and nothing could be further than In truth, one of

(37:06):
the most important parts of the jury trial system is
that the judge is going to give those jury instructions
as to how each fact patterns to be judged. So
you need to keep an open mind not only as
to the facts, but as to the law as well.
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