February 6, 2020 - Serving on a jury can be an exciting and interesting experience. I have been summoned to jury duty many times but only once have I been picked as a jurist. The year was 1959 when I received a jury summons from San Augustine County District Court to join about forty other people to be vetted for jury duty on a murder case.
I was around twenty-one years old at the time and quite frankly did not really believe that I would be selected as a juror for this trial. As it turned out, I was completely surprised when both attorneys approved of my jury service, and was immediately sequestered in the third floor dormitory of the court house. Again, to my surprise, I was selected as foreman of the jury.
The State of Texas was prosecuting an elderly gentleman for murdering his son-in-law. This could turn out to be quite interesting, I thought as the trial process began.
It seems that Mr. Smith* was accused of shooting his son-in-law after an altercation, and the victim died as a result of the wound. The testimony began in the trial, which lasted three days.
On the day of the shooting, Mr. Smith had come home from work late in the afternoon. His wife was boiling a large pot of water on the stove intending to cook up a mess of collard greens. However, Mr. Smith took the water and used it to wash himself. This made Mrs. Smith boiling mad and they had what we call now a “family disturbance”. She kicked him out of the house as a result of that collard green incident. Having no where else to go, Mr. Smith decided to spend the night in his vehicle parked in the front yard.
Seemingly so far this would have had an innocent conclusion except for another “family disturbance” directly across the street from Mr. Smith’s vehicle. Mr. Smith’s grown daughter and her husband lived in a small house across the street, and they got into a rather loud argument during the night.
In direct testimony, Mr. Smith indicated that he listened to the loud arguing for as long as he could stand it, then yelled at them to “ stop the arguing so I can sleep”. Apparently he did this several times. Finally, the son-in-law responded with some unprintable choice words at Mr. Smith to mind his own business. He threatened to come over and beat Mr. Smith to a pulp.
Suddenly, the son-in-law stalked out of his front door and headed toward Mr. Smith’s parked car, yelling obscenities as he approached. After he crossed over the street into his yard, Mr. Smith testified that he retrieved a shotgun in the back seat of his vehicle, and shot his son-in-law as he reached the car.
Mortally wounded, the young man crossed back over the street and collapsed on his own front porch and expired. That, in a nutshell, was Mr. Smith’s story. His defense was, of course, self preservation.
We on the jury had to decide this older man’s fate. There were no actual witnesses, so the evidence was basically Mr. Smith’s story, and that of his daughter, who acknowledged the loud fight with the deceased. As I recall, we found Mr. Smith not guilty as he was simply defending himself against a much younger aggressor.
I think the lesson I learned from this story out of the past is that whenever we guys see a pot of boiling water on the stove, don’t use it as our own. You don’t want another “collard green incident” to place you in deep trouble.
As for me, I have never served on a jury since, nor have I eaten any collard greens.
* Name changed
