Members of the jury didn't know what type of case they were about to hear when they filed into the courtroom Monday morning.
It could have been anything, a DUI case, possibly breaking and entering.
Who could have guessed the horrors the court docket held? As jurors took their seats and shook off their bed, the case they were about to hear took shape.
It was a rape case.
A child rape case.
A child rape case with graphic testimony that won't soon be forgotten.
The intimate details which were revealed Monday at Warren County Courthouse were slathered with pain. The testimony of a woman, now almost 20, indicated her sexual abuse began about the time she was learning the alphabet. It was a case which ended Tuesday afternoon when jurors returned to say they were unable to reach a verdict and a hung jury was declared.
"I was sitting there when the jury foreman made the announcement and I didn't even want to be in the room I was so embarrassed," a female member of that jury told me Wednesday. "I didn't want anybody to see me. In my mind, I thought he was guilty. I wanted to convict him. The testimony was so real. There was no way she could have been making that up. And he just sat there. His expression never changed. Why would you sit there like that, never showing any emotion? If you were innocent, that wouldn't be your reaction at all. It couldn't be."
Nine jurors wanted to convict of child rape. Three jurors weren't so sure. The end result: a hung jury and prosecutors scratching their heads about whether to try the case again.
"I hope they do," the juror told me. "The people who refused to convict him said they had to have some sort of physical evidence, that they weren't going to find him guilty based on what one person said."
That one person said she was forced to perform oral sex when she was in kindergarten. She claimed she suffered hundreds of instances of sexual abuse at the hands of a man she called a monster from the witness stand. It was a haunting portrayal, although only two people know with 100 percent certainty if it is a true one.
It's one thing to talk big and say what you would have done if you were a juror in this case. It's another to have a man's life in your hands and be the one deciding where he spends the next 25 years of his life.
Our criminal justice system dictates we have the right to a fair trial and the right to have a jury of our peers determine our fate. It's also been said it's better to have 100 guilty men walk free than to have one innocent man thrown in jail.
We can only hope if guilty men are indeed allowed to walk free, they aren't guilty of forcing 5-year-olds to perform sex acts.
Standard editor James Clark can be reached at 473-2191.