In another thread, the cliche of whether it is a 'good' shoot came up on whether your CCW permit will come up in court to your detriment. Or will your hollowpoints, assault rifle, internet commando rantings, etc?
So what is a good shoot - if you went to court, someone doesn't think so. So the cliche is worthless because you are in court. Then what happens. Of course, the jury is rational and some proponent of self-defense will stand up for you. Or not.
FYI, this is an ongoing case that came to verdict in NY. Please ignore the race issue, just to look at the last hold out juror's view of the process. Think your trial isn't going to have some subjectivity as to whether it was a good shoot.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/nyregion/30white.html
September 30, 2006
Questions of Race and Intent Haunt a Long Island Shooting
By PAUL VITELLO
MILLER PLACE, N.Y., Sept. 26 — When John H. White, 53, was sent to jail for the first time in his life last month, young black inmates at the Suffolk County Correctional Facility sought him out to give him his “props” — slang for respect.
They recognized him immediately from TV clips as that somber, professorial-looking black man who had confronted a group of white teenagers chasing his 19-year-old son and fatally shot one of them, Daniel Cicciaro, 17.
The inmates wanted to give Mr. White props for defending his son against what they saw as a white mob.
Mr. White said he cut them off, appalled. “Whoa! Whoa! Back off,” he told them. “You’ve got the wrong idea. It was an accident. I didn’t want to kill nobody, you understand? Keep your props.”
Everyone involved has said essentially the same thing, that race played no role in the cascade of events that led to the shooting here on Aug. 9. The four young men who were with Mr. Cicciaro said so. Mr. Cicciaro’s father, also named Daniel, said that to ascribe racist motives to his son was to slander a young man who had many black friends and whose mother is Puerto Rican.
Mr. White, whose $100,000 cash bail was posted on Sept. 14 in large part by Italian-American co-workers at the paving company where he has been employed for the last 21 years, said in response to a question that he did not see the young men pursuing his son as a white mob but as “a group of grown men” threatening his family.
But perhaps, as the issue of race plays out in many suburbs, race was nowhere and yet everywhere in the events of that night.
In recent interviews with Mr. White and the Cicciaro family, a picture of two families sharing similar values emerged. Both were long-married couples with two sons. Both had moved in the last two years to new homes in new suburban developments where, they said, they had hoped to enjoy a hard-earned prosperity.
Mr. White, an avid gardener who supported his family as a union laborer, commuting two hours each way between Suffolk County and New York City, had found a cul-de-sac in which to tend his dahlias and day lilies. Mr. Cicciaro, who owns an auto repair shop, had settled his family in a new house with room enough for an oversized garage for his collection of restored cars.
Yet, although their sons were acquainted, the families’ worlds were to a great extent delimited by an unwritten code of life on Long Island.
John and Sonia White, both originally from the South Bronx, are among a tiny number of blacks living in their development, and among only 47 black families in the community of Miller Place, population 11,000. That is a roughly proportional reflection of the larger reality of racial separation on the island, where about 12 percent of the population is black, while less than 1 percent live in communities that are integrated, according to census data.
On the night of Aug. 9, the surface calm of that predictable world was broken by a storm of unpredictable factors — alcohol, testosterone, and what seemed like a resurrection of the ghosts of Jim Crow. These ghosts included a rumor of rape connecting a black man to a white girl; two carloads of white men in pursuit; racial epithets; and an old handgun carried to Long Island from Alabama.
The shooting occurred around midnight of a Wednesday evening during which Mr. White’s son, Aaron, attended a party at an acquaintance’s home in a nearby town. At the party, where the police said there was a lot of drinking, a group of young men, all white, accused Aaron White of having threatened to rape a girl, also white. The threat was said to have been made by e-mail nine months before.
Though he denied making any threat, Aaron White was asked to leave, and did so. A short time later, according to the police, a group of men led by Mr. Cicciaro decided to pursue him. By cellphone, Mr. Cicciaro told him that he and his friends were coming after him, according to the police.
In the interview, Mr. White said he was awakened by his son “from a dead sleep.” The son told him that Mr. Cicciaro and his friends were pursuing him, and why. He said he thought “they were going to kill him,” Mr. White said, adding that Aaron was “more frightened than I had ever heard my son in his life.”
Mr. White said he grabbed a weapon he kept for protection, a handgun he had inherited from a grandfather, Napoleon White, who brought it with him when he left Oneonta, Ala., in the 1940’s for New York. In an unsolicited aside during the interview, Mr. White said his grandfather had left not long after the Klan killed two brothers, both shopkeepers. (The police described the unregistered gun as “an antique.”)
According to both Mr. White and his son, Mr. Cicciaro and his friends used racial slurs when they arrived at his house. The young men later denied it.
Mr. White said he told the men to leave, and that after “a lot of posturing” they seemed to be ready to go, when suddenly Mr. Cicciaro rushed him and grabbed the muzzle of his gun.
Mr. Cicciaro’s friends gave the police a different account. They said Mr. White pointed the gun in the face of each of them, shouting, “I’ll shoot you.” They said Mr. Cicciaro never grabbed the gun but waved it away when it was pointed in his face.
Mr. White said that when he tried to pull away from Mr. Cicciaro’s grasp, the gun went off accidentally. Mr. Cicciaro’s friends told the police that Mr. White simply pulled the trigger at point-blank range.
It was in the frantic 911 call by one of Mr. Cicciaro’s friends, made from a car carrying the mortally wounded teenager to a nearby hospital, that a police tape captured the type of racial invective the Whites said they had heard throughout the confrontation. The cellphone had been left on, and Mr. Cicciaro’s friends were heard using racial profanities as they spoke among themselves, investigators said.
A Suffolk County grand jury indicted Mr. White on gun charges and a single count of second-degree manslaughter, which is a charge of reckless homicide. The police initially charged him with second-degree murder, the intentional killing of Mr. Cicciaro.
In a separate interview, Daniel Cicciaro Sr., a man of medium height with scarred hands from many years of work in auto repairs, seemed almost in pain as he maintained an air of self-control. With his wife, Joanne, sitting beside him on the porch of their home in Port Jefferson, he said: “I want you to know I have no animosity personally or racially toward the White family. I cannot presume to know what was going through his mind at the time he killed my son. But God have mercy on Mr. White.”
Mr. Cicciaro returned again and again to his son’s lack of racial prejudice and the unlikelihood that race played any role in his pursuit of Aaron White. “If going to this guy’s house to beat up his son was seen as some sort of racial attack, my son was so not-racist that the thought would never even have occurred to him,” he said.
He disputed Mr. White’s claim that the shooting was accidental: “If it was an accident, like he says, why didn’t he call the police immediately? He called his lawyer instead. And why does he come out with a loaded gun in the first place?”
During his interview, Mr. White, a tall, thin bespectacled man with thinning hair, spoke with a similarly painstaking deliberateness. He said he had the gun to “protect my family” and told his wife to call the police, but she told investigators she did not hear him.
After the shooting, Mr. White said, he and his wife did not call 911 because they were “in shock.” Since the killing, “I have not slept at all,” he said. “I never think about anything else.” He said he felt “devastated and remorseful” for killing the teenager. “But I thought these guys, this mob, was coming to hurt my child.”
Asked if he saw them as a white mob, Mr. White pondered for a moment. “I saw them as a group of grown men in my driveway. I was scared to death.”
In describing his background, Mr. White placed himself as the second of eight children, and he referred repeatedly and with deep affection to his grandfather, tearing up when describing the family lore about the Klan killings of his great-uncles.
When pressed, Mr. White said he viewed his grandfather’s world and his as different universes. He rejected any notion that he might have perceived what happened in his driveway through the prism of his grandfather’s losses.
“I did not mean to shoot that young man,” he said. “I grieve for his family. I moved out here with my children just like everyone else, to protect them,” he said. “I have never had problems with white people — if I did, why would I have come out here in the first place?”
Mr. Cicciaro said he was “baffled” by a charge of less than murder against a man who “walked 80 feet down his driveway and told these kids he was going to shoot them, and then pulled the trigger.” He said he was “extremely disappointed” in the criminal justice system.
Mr. White said he understood that disappointment, but added that when he picked up his gun, he only meant to “scare those kids off,” he said.
During the interview, he referred several times to his new home as “my dream house.” He recounted how his wife, Sonia, decorated the house with loving attention. “Stickley, Audi in the dining room; Henredon, Baker living room; Kashan rugs, the works,” he said.
They will be leaving that house as soon as they can, Mr. White said.
“I wouldn’t feel comfortable keeping my family here. I know how I would feel if someone hurt my kid,” he said. “There wouldn’t be a rock left to crawl under.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/nyregion/25jury.html?ref=nyregion
December 25, 2007
Juror in Long Island Killing Says He Was Pressured Into a Guilty Verdict
By COREY KILGANNON and NATE SCHWEBER
At 8 p.m. on Saturday, a jury deciding the racially charged manslaughter case of a black man who shot a white teenager last year was still “hopelessly deadlocked,” to use the term the jurors used earlier in a note to the judge.
It was the 11th hour of the fourth day of jury deliberations, and a pack of news crews was waiting, as were lawyers, anxious relatives of the defendant and the victim and a racially divided gallery that had sat on separate sides of a courtroom in the Suffolk County courthouse for a month.
A mistrial seemed imminent. But Judge Barbara Kahn, who had given the jury the case on Wednesday, kept them deliberating late Friday night. Then, when they could not reach a unanimous verdict, she called them in on Saturday, asking them to give their home phone numbers to court officials and indicating that they would have to come in again Sunday if they did not reach a decision, and then on Monday, Christmas Eve.
In fact, most of the jury — 10 members — had already concluded by then that the man, John H. White, 54, was guilty of second-degree manslaughter in the shooting of Daniel Cicciaro Jr., 17.
Daniel was shot point-blank in the face on August 9, 2006, after he and several friends arrived at Mr. White’s house and began using racial epithets in challenging Mr. White’s son, Aaron, then 19, to fight.
But there were two holdouts on the jury. And to one of them, François Larché, 46, of West Islip, Mr. White’s account of the night’s events — that the shooting was an accident and that he was protecting his family and home against a “lynch mob” of angry teenagers — resonated.
In an interview at his home, Mr. Larché said he still thought there was reasonable doubt about Mr. White’s guilt. On Saturday night, when the jury was polled, he refused to vote guilty, he said. He said that he and a female juror, whom he declined to name, had endured pressure and mistreatment from the other jurors because they remained “diametrically opposed” to them.
But by the end of the night on Saturday, he said, the pressure and the rigorous deliberating schedule finally caused them to buckle. At 8:30, he said, he spoke with the other holdout.
“I said: ‘That’s it, I’m done. I don’t know what you want to do, but that’s it for me,’” Mr. Larché recalled. “Everyone stayed real quiet when that happened. They were probably whispering to themselves, ‘Hallelujah.’”
Within a few minutes, the jury of six white women, five white men and one black man walked into the courtroom and told Mr. White that he had been found guilty.
There was no immediate comment from the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, but a lawyer for Mr. White, Frederick K. Brewington, said Monday that the setting of such a rigorous schedule for the jury “turned up the pressure for a verdict” and “was like dynamite to throw into an already explosive case.”
The manslaughter charge that Mr. White was convicted of carries a maximum sentence of 5 to 15 years. Mr. Brewington said he was appealing the decision and would request that Mr. White, who is free on $100,000 bail until his Feb. 21 sentencing, remain out of prison until the appeal.
Mr. Larché, who is white and immigrated from South Africa in 1982 partly because of his hatred of apartheid, said that he was badgered by the other jury members for holding out.
“They were making attacks on me,” and with that dynamic, he added, “You’re not going to be able to work.”
On Friday, the jury sent Judge Kahn a note stating that certain jurors were not properly following her instructions and needed to be reminded of legal aspects of the charges. Mr. Larché said that other jurors “told me I was misinterpreting the law.” But, he said, he firmly believed there was reasonable doubt that Mr. White was guilty.
“The doubt is definitely there,” he said. “You have the right to use deadly force if you believe your person or property is threatened. Does he have justification for that? I think he does.”
If other jurors had paid closer attention to the charges, he said, “They might have made a different decision.”
In an interview at his home yesterday, Juror No. 12, Richard Burke, called the deliberations “very emotional” but he said that there was no pressuring of the jurors. “Nobody pressured nobody,” Mr. Burke said. “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, and it was a process. Some people just see things a little different, and when the verdict happened, it happened. It was just an act of God, and that was that.”
For his part, Mr. Larché denounced the performance of his fellow jurors. “I don’t think there was any process followed where all the jurors objectively looked at the evidence and testimony and put all the pieces together,” he said, adding that he finally gave in to the pressure. “I wish that the people of the State of New York gave this man another trial in another county,” he said. “I don’t think Suffolk County will ever be fair to Mr. White.”
So what is a good shoot - if you went to court, someone doesn't think so. So the cliche is worthless because you are in court. Then what happens. Of course, the jury is rational and some proponent of self-defense will stand up for you. Or not.
FYI, this is an ongoing case that came to verdict in NY. Please ignore the race issue, just to look at the last hold out juror's view of the process. Think your trial isn't going to have some subjectivity as to whether it was a good shoot.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/nyregion/30white.html
September 30, 2006
Questions of Race and Intent Haunt a Long Island Shooting
By PAUL VITELLO
MILLER PLACE, N.Y., Sept. 26 — When John H. White, 53, was sent to jail for the first time in his life last month, young black inmates at the Suffolk County Correctional Facility sought him out to give him his “props” — slang for respect.
They recognized him immediately from TV clips as that somber, professorial-looking black man who had confronted a group of white teenagers chasing his 19-year-old son and fatally shot one of them, Daniel Cicciaro, 17.
The inmates wanted to give Mr. White props for defending his son against what they saw as a white mob.
Mr. White said he cut them off, appalled. “Whoa! Whoa! Back off,” he told them. “You’ve got the wrong idea. It was an accident. I didn’t want to kill nobody, you understand? Keep your props.”
Everyone involved has said essentially the same thing, that race played no role in the cascade of events that led to the shooting here on Aug. 9. The four young men who were with Mr. Cicciaro said so. Mr. Cicciaro’s father, also named Daniel, said that to ascribe racist motives to his son was to slander a young man who had many black friends and whose mother is Puerto Rican.
Mr. White, whose $100,000 cash bail was posted on Sept. 14 in large part by Italian-American co-workers at the paving company where he has been employed for the last 21 years, said in response to a question that he did not see the young men pursuing his son as a white mob but as “a group of grown men” threatening his family.
But perhaps, as the issue of race plays out in many suburbs, race was nowhere and yet everywhere in the events of that night.
In recent interviews with Mr. White and the Cicciaro family, a picture of two families sharing similar values emerged. Both were long-married couples with two sons. Both had moved in the last two years to new homes in new suburban developments where, they said, they had hoped to enjoy a hard-earned prosperity.
Mr. White, an avid gardener who supported his family as a union laborer, commuting two hours each way between Suffolk County and New York City, had found a cul-de-sac in which to tend his dahlias and day lilies. Mr. Cicciaro, who owns an auto repair shop, had settled his family in a new house with room enough for an oversized garage for his collection of restored cars.
Yet, although their sons were acquainted, the families’ worlds were to a great extent delimited by an unwritten code of life on Long Island.
John and Sonia White, both originally from the South Bronx, are among a tiny number of blacks living in their development, and among only 47 black families in the community of Miller Place, population 11,000. That is a roughly proportional reflection of the larger reality of racial separation on the island, where about 12 percent of the population is black, while less than 1 percent live in communities that are integrated, according to census data.
On the night of Aug. 9, the surface calm of that predictable world was broken by a storm of unpredictable factors — alcohol, testosterone, and what seemed like a resurrection of the ghosts of Jim Crow. These ghosts included a rumor of rape connecting a black man to a white girl; two carloads of white men in pursuit; racial epithets; and an old handgun carried to Long Island from Alabama.
The shooting occurred around midnight of a Wednesday evening during which Mr. White’s son, Aaron, attended a party at an acquaintance’s home in a nearby town. At the party, where the police said there was a lot of drinking, a group of young men, all white, accused Aaron White of having threatened to rape a girl, also white. The threat was said to have been made by e-mail nine months before.
Though he denied making any threat, Aaron White was asked to leave, and did so. A short time later, according to the police, a group of men led by Mr. Cicciaro decided to pursue him. By cellphone, Mr. Cicciaro told him that he and his friends were coming after him, according to the police.
In the interview, Mr. White said he was awakened by his son “from a dead sleep.” The son told him that Mr. Cicciaro and his friends were pursuing him, and why. He said he thought “they were going to kill him,” Mr. White said, adding that Aaron was “more frightened than I had ever heard my son in his life.”
Mr. White said he grabbed a weapon he kept for protection, a handgun he had inherited from a grandfather, Napoleon White, who brought it with him when he left Oneonta, Ala., in the 1940’s for New York. In an unsolicited aside during the interview, Mr. White said his grandfather had left not long after the Klan killed two brothers, both shopkeepers. (The police described the unregistered gun as “an antique.”)
According to both Mr. White and his son, Mr. Cicciaro and his friends used racial slurs when they arrived at his house. The young men later denied it.
Mr. White said he told the men to leave, and that after “a lot of posturing” they seemed to be ready to go, when suddenly Mr. Cicciaro rushed him and grabbed the muzzle of his gun.
Mr. Cicciaro’s friends gave the police a different account. They said Mr. White pointed the gun in the face of each of them, shouting, “I’ll shoot you.” They said Mr. Cicciaro never grabbed the gun but waved it away when it was pointed in his face.
Mr. White said that when he tried to pull away from Mr. Cicciaro’s grasp, the gun went off accidentally. Mr. Cicciaro’s friends told the police that Mr. White simply pulled the trigger at point-blank range.
It was in the frantic 911 call by one of Mr. Cicciaro’s friends, made from a car carrying the mortally wounded teenager to a nearby hospital, that a police tape captured the type of racial invective the Whites said they had heard throughout the confrontation. The cellphone had been left on, and Mr. Cicciaro’s friends were heard using racial profanities as they spoke among themselves, investigators said.
A Suffolk County grand jury indicted Mr. White on gun charges and a single count of second-degree manslaughter, which is a charge of reckless homicide. The police initially charged him with second-degree murder, the intentional killing of Mr. Cicciaro.
In a separate interview, Daniel Cicciaro Sr., a man of medium height with scarred hands from many years of work in auto repairs, seemed almost in pain as he maintained an air of self-control. With his wife, Joanne, sitting beside him on the porch of their home in Port Jefferson, he said: “I want you to know I have no animosity personally or racially toward the White family. I cannot presume to know what was going through his mind at the time he killed my son. But God have mercy on Mr. White.”
Mr. Cicciaro returned again and again to his son’s lack of racial prejudice and the unlikelihood that race played any role in his pursuit of Aaron White. “If going to this guy’s house to beat up his son was seen as some sort of racial attack, my son was so not-racist that the thought would never even have occurred to him,” he said.
He disputed Mr. White’s claim that the shooting was accidental: “If it was an accident, like he says, why didn’t he call the police immediately? He called his lawyer instead. And why does he come out with a loaded gun in the first place?”
During his interview, Mr. White, a tall, thin bespectacled man with thinning hair, spoke with a similarly painstaking deliberateness. He said he had the gun to “protect my family” and told his wife to call the police, but she told investigators she did not hear him.
After the shooting, Mr. White said, he and his wife did not call 911 because they were “in shock.” Since the killing, “I have not slept at all,” he said. “I never think about anything else.” He said he felt “devastated and remorseful” for killing the teenager. “But I thought these guys, this mob, was coming to hurt my child.”
Asked if he saw them as a white mob, Mr. White pondered for a moment. “I saw them as a group of grown men in my driveway. I was scared to death.”
In describing his background, Mr. White placed himself as the second of eight children, and he referred repeatedly and with deep affection to his grandfather, tearing up when describing the family lore about the Klan killings of his great-uncles.
When pressed, Mr. White said he viewed his grandfather’s world and his as different universes. He rejected any notion that he might have perceived what happened in his driveway through the prism of his grandfather’s losses.
“I did not mean to shoot that young man,” he said. “I grieve for his family. I moved out here with my children just like everyone else, to protect them,” he said. “I have never had problems with white people — if I did, why would I have come out here in the first place?”
Mr. Cicciaro said he was “baffled” by a charge of less than murder against a man who “walked 80 feet down his driveway and told these kids he was going to shoot them, and then pulled the trigger.” He said he was “extremely disappointed” in the criminal justice system.
Mr. White said he understood that disappointment, but added that when he picked up his gun, he only meant to “scare those kids off,” he said.
During the interview, he referred several times to his new home as “my dream house.” He recounted how his wife, Sonia, decorated the house with loving attention. “Stickley, Audi in the dining room; Henredon, Baker living room; Kashan rugs, the works,” he said.
They will be leaving that house as soon as they can, Mr. White said.
“I wouldn’t feel comfortable keeping my family here. I know how I would feel if someone hurt my kid,” he said. “There wouldn’t be a rock left to crawl under.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/nyregion/25jury.html?ref=nyregion
December 25, 2007
Juror in Long Island Killing Says He Was Pressured Into a Guilty Verdict
By COREY KILGANNON and NATE SCHWEBER
At 8 p.m. on Saturday, a jury deciding the racially charged manslaughter case of a black man who shot a white teenager last year was still “hopelessly deadlocked,” to use the term the jurors used earlier in a note to the judge.
It was the 11th hour of the fourth day of jury deliberations, and a pack of news crews was waiting, as were lawyers, anxious relatives of the defendant and the victim and a racially divided gallery that had sat on separate sides of a courtroom in the Suffolk County courthouse for a month.
A mistrial seemed imminent. But Judge Barbara Kahn, who had given the jury the case on Wednesday, kept them deliberating late Friday night. Then, when they could not reach a unanimous verdict, she called them in on Saturday, asking them to give their home phone numbers to court officials and indicating that they would have to come in again Sunday if they did not reach a decision, and then on Monday, Christmas Eve.
In fact, most of the jury — 10 members — had already concluded by then that the man, John H. White, 54, was guilty of second-degree manslaughter in the shooting of Daniel Cicciaro Jr., 17.
Daniel was shot point-blank in the face on August 9, 2006, after he and several friends arrived at Mr. White’s house and began using racial epithets in challenging Mr. White’s son, Aaron, then 19, to fight.
But there were two holdouts on the jury. And to one of them, François Larché, 46, of West Islip, Mr. White’s account of the night’s events — that the shooting was an accident and that he was protecting his family and home against a “lynch mob” of angry teenagers — resonated.
In an interview at his home, Mr. Larché said he still thought there was reasonable doubt about Mr. White’s guilt. On Saturday night, when the jury was polled, he refused to vote guilty, he said. He said that he and a female juror, whom he declined to name, had endured pressure and mistreatment from the other jurors because they remained “diametrically opposed” to them.
But by the end of the night on Saturday, he said, the pressure and the rigorous deliberating schedule finally caused them to buckle. At 8:30, he said, he spoke with the other holdout.
“I said: ‘That’s it, I’m done. I don’t know what you want to do, but that’s it for me,’” Mr. Larché recalled. “Everyone stayed real quiet when that happened. They were probably whispering to themselves, ‘Hallelujah.’”
Within a few minutes, the jury of six white women, five white men and one black man walked into the courtroom and told Mr. White that he had been found guilty.
There was no immediate comment from the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, but a lawyer for Mr. White, Frederick K. Brewington, said Monday that the setting of such a rigorous schedule for the jury “turned up the pressure for a verdict” and “was like dynamite to throw into an already explosive case.”
The manslaughter charge that Mr. White was convicted of carries a maximum sentence of 5 to 15 years. Mr. Brewington said he was appealing the decision and would request that Mr. White, who is free on $100,000 bail until his Feb. 21 sentencing, remain out of prison until the appeal.
Mr. Larché, who is white and immigrated from South Africa in 1982 partly because of his hatred of apartheid, said that he was badgered by the other jury members for holding out.
“They were making attacks on me,” and with that dynamic, he added, “You’re not going to be able to work.”
On Friday, the jury sent Judge Kahn a note stating that certain jurors were not properly following her instructions and needed to be reminded of legal aspects of the charges. Mr. Larché said that other jurors “told me I was misinterpreting the law.” But, he said, he firmly believed there was reasonable doubt that Mr. White was guilty.
“The doubt is definitely there,” he said. “You have the right to use deadly force if you believe your person or property is threatened. Does he have justification for that? I think he does.”
If other jurors had paid closer attention to the charges, he said, “They might have made a different decision.”
In an interview at his home yesterday, Juror No. 12, Richard Burke, called the deliberations “very emotional” but he said that there was no pressuring of the jurors. “Nobody pressured nobody,” Mr. Burke said. “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, and it was a process. Some people just see things a little different, and when the verdict happened, it happened. It was just an act of God, and that was that.”
For his part, Mr. Larché denounced the performance of his fellow jurors. “I don’t think there was any process followed where all the jurors objectively looked at the evidence and testimony and put all the pieces together,” he said, adding that he finally gave in to the pressure. “I wish that the people of the State of New York gave this man another trial in another county,” he said. “I don’t think Suffolk County will ever be fair to Mr. White.”
