The Tainted Trial of Farah Jama by Julie Szego

Author:Julie Szego [Szego, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, Biography - Memoir
ISBN: 9780987381163
Publisher: Wild Dingo Press
Published: 2014-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

On the fourth day of the trial, before Judge Lacava gave his charge to the jury, the inevitable happened. From the jury room came a question for the judge: why did the police have Jama’s DNA on their database in the first place?

‘We should have had money on this!’ the judge quipped. ‘The inevitable question has been asked.’ To the jurors, the judge responded that this was ‘irrelevant’. They were not to ‘speculate’ on it any further.

As would eventually become clear, a tragic paradox under-pinned the trial of Farah Jama. To ensure he had a fair hearing, free of prejudice, the pool hall incident of the night before needed to be concealed from the jury; and yet concealing the incident, precluding any possibility of its airing in that courtroom, all but ensured his wrongful conviction. All the same, imagine what might have ensued had Judge Lacava given the jury a more expansive answer. Imagine if he had levelled with the jurors, told them Jama’s DNA was on the police database because he had been investigated over a rape allegation that turned out to be false. Would jurors really accept the proposition that a young man was falsely accused of rape not once, but twice?

How often does lightning strike?

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