Ellen Barry:

Juries were supposed to change Russia. Introduced amid a raft of liberal reforms in 1993, they shifted power away from the state structure and thrust it into the hands of citizens. Juries introduced real competition into Russia's courts, granting acquittals in 15 to 20 percent of cases, compared with less than 1 percent in cases decided by judges.

But the state has never been happy about leaving the fate of high-profile prosecutions in the hands of ordinary people.

"The law doesn't work. People in power can do whatever they want with the law," said Iosif L. Nagle. "It is always unpleasant when some of your illusions are destroyed."

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Tux Life:

I won't say I wanted to be put on a jury for a criminal case, but when the opportunity arose I certainly welcomed it.

...

Apparently, once the prosecution realized that there was a hung jury, they became nervous that the tide would turn, as is frequently the case and as was the trend in this case as well according to our votes, from guilty to not guilty. Rather than risk losing a conviction and/or having a retrial, they dropped their demand that the defendant be tried as an adult and allowed him to take a plea of "strongarm robbery," which would put him in something called a Youthful Offenders Program, which is a sort of transitional detention from boyhood to adulthood which requires that its residents get a GED and learn skills that will keep them from coming back into the legal and penal systems. It's one of those pesky rehab facilities the crime-and-punishment crowd loves to hate. The judge was very happy with this result because he didn't want to see this boy get sent off to a man prison and either not survive or come out more serious about crime than his very serious but seemingly unconsidered youthful indiscretion. He would also pay the victim $2,000 in restitution. The judge even told us that he had predicted a hung jury, that the evidence, while convincing, just wasn't solid enough in either direction.

What you truly have is a proverbial sausage factory: it's incredibly messy, nothing seems to make sense, nothing looks good or reasonable or even real, but at the end of the line there is something like justice. It doesn't always look right. It doesn't always feel right. It doesn't even always taste right. But it's at least palatable. And no matter how it is, it's never for a lack of sincerely trying.

Mark Twain:

In my early manhood and in middle-life, I used to vex myself with reforms, every now and then. And I never had occasion to regret these divergencies, for whether the resulting deprivations were long or short, the rewarding pleasures which I got out of the vice when I returned to it, always paid me for all that it cost.