"We Did The Right Thing"

Aaron Hernandez Jurors: "We Did The Right Thing"

FALL RIVER, Mass. — An hour after Aaron Hernandez's jurors returned a verdict Wednesday that sent one man to prison for life and gave another man's family a sense of justice, they stood-by-side and reminisced about both the emotionally grueling and lighter moments of the 11-week trial.

"It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, absolutely, by far," said Taunton resident Malessa Strachan, at a press conference after the former New England Patriots tight end received a life sentence without parole.

Strachan, 52, was the jury foreperson who read the verdict after the court clerk asked if Hernandez was not guilty, guilty of murder, or guilty of murder in the second degree. When asked by which theory, deliberate premeditation or extreme atrocity and cruelty, Strachan replied extreme atrocity and cruelty.

The jury said victim Odin Lloyd's six gunshot wounds lead them to that decision, but one juror said they reached that conclusion for a variety of reasons. Prosecutors described Hernandez firing two shots to Lloyd's chest after he hit the ground, and a medical examiner testified that three of the six gunshot wounds would have been independently fatal. The government accused Hernandez of planning Lloyd's killing, but jurors did not agree that the state's evidence proved premeditation.

"I don't think that it indicates there wasn't premeditation, I just think it means we couldn't unanimously conclude that there was evidence of premeditation," said juror Jon Carlson. "However, we all agreed that there was evidence of extreme atrocity or cruelty."
Seven women and five men decided the case, and three additional women who sat through the three months of testimony were selected as alternates after closing arguments. None of them had served on a jury before this case. None of them wanted to again. They range in age from their twenties to fifties, and they gave up three months of work – including as a dental hygienist, a store manager, a utility manager and a planning and an accounts manager – to serve on the jury. Through the experience, they said they formed friendships for life.

The women on the jury said they shed tears in the deliberation room during the 36 hours it took them to decide the case. Several jurors said they experienced similar emotions during the trial.
For Jennifer Rogers, the pictures of Lloyd's bullet-riddled body prosecutors displayed early in their case were hard to stomach.

"When the pictures first got put up – you're told to be unemotional. To sit there and hold back tears was hard," she said.
Rosalie Oliver felt a pang of emotion later in the trial, when the prosecution called the victim's best friend as one of their final witnesses.

"When Odin's friend was on the stand you could see his loss, the amount of loss," Oliver said.

Sean Traverse, a 28-year-old assistant store manager from Norton, said the trial "just makes you appreciate how quick life can end, and how fleeting it can be."

Members of the jury laughed as they remembered the lighter moments that broke up the nine weeks of testimony from more than 130 witnesses.
Japheth Lema, 32, of Taunton, Mass., said he bit back a laugh when defense attorney James Sultan made a Patriots Deflategate joke during cross-examination of a police witness who was trained in tire deflation devices. Amid allegations that the Patriots used deflated footballs in the AFC championship game, Sultan asked the witness if he had received training in football deflation devices. The jury laughed as they remembered prosecutors knocking over a mannequin they used during testimony from a state medical examiner.

They said they felt bad for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, because he had a cold when he testified. They admitted that they found hours of testimony about cellphone records boring.

"We definitely experienced information overload, that was for sure," said Anthony Ferry, the utility manager.
There was some information about Hernandez not provided to jurors – like Hernandez's pending charges in a 2012 double homicide in Boston, for which he is expected to stand trial later this year. When Hernandez's former friend, East Hartford, Conn. native Alexander Bradley testified, they did not know that he has filed a civil suit accusing the former Patriots tight end of shooting him in the eye in February 2013. They said Bristol County Superior Court Judge E. Susan Garsh told them about those allegations immediately after the verdict was read.

Several jurors said that learning of the other shootings reaffirmed their belief that "we did the right thing."

Six of them said they were Patriots fans, but all said that they did not know anything about Hernandez at the beginning of the case.

"I think we'll all remember it for the rest of our lives," one juror said.

Cr.Courant