I made the director's cut.

In which our hero obtains a directed verdict in a felony jury trial, and has some advice about replicating this particular experiment in jurisprudence.

In a true testament to how nature is healing post-COVID, I have been in at least one felony jury trial every month this year, with no signs that this will not be broadly true for the remaining months, though perhaps I will get a reprieve in September for my birthday.

Last month, we doubled (and very nearly tripled) up on trials. This is the story of those cases.

In fair Midland, where we lay our scene…

It started in July, as August sometimes does, with picking a jury on July 31. I thought we selected a fairly nice jury, but lo and behold, by the time we sat them, we realized something: the Legislature had acted to strip away the right of the jury to give probation, but the court, the State, and myself, had all missed it, and we had voir dired¹ the jury on the availability of probation. When we discovered our error, the answer was clear: we had to dismiss the jury and try again.

We reset the case for a few more weeks, and in that time, I faced a difficult decision: the circumstances under which I had advised my client to take the case to trial resulted around a possible scenario of convicted-but-out of prison. Now, the very best result my client could obtain, were they convicted, would be two years in the Texas Department of Corrections plus lifetime registration as a sex offender. The state, perhaps foreseeing the weakness in their own case, offered my client deferred adjudication, which would prevent her having a conviction (though registration would still be compulsory).