I kind of doubt in this case the one juror was persuasive and affected the verdicts. The verdicts occured almost instantaneously. It does take time for a jury to read the possible outcomes and to write the verdicts up. There were a lot of verdicts.
I hope the argument that all 12 jurors were fair and impartial is the argument that prevails. To have to put this victim through the ordeal of repeating the trial…
Vanderbilt was looking at the security camera tapes for that dorm to see if they could determine who vandalized a door. They came across video of the boys carrying the woman into the dorm. They were alarmed and notified the police perhaps thinking the woman was dead.
I am annoyed about something else…Although the victim was never named, so many hints about her identity were given that it took me all of about 30 seconds to find her name and photo on a Vanderbilt website.
That’s just plain wrong.
A jury of peers, if it includes 12 people, 6 of them women, ought to have at least one rape victim on it. Or so my anecdotal experience would suggest.
@OHMomof2 Well, you want to avoid that, just as you would not want to have someone whose brother is a member of the VU football team serve as a juror.
Two-defendant trials are complicated enough as it is (opposing interests). You want to keep any chance at impartiality out of it. The court wants to minimize the chances of a reversal.
I think a more appropriate analogy might be “football player”.
“brother of a VU football player” is more like “sister of a VU rape victim”.
@HarvestMoon1, I think we must have heard the same thing on CNN (last Friday, Ashleigh Banfield had a long segment on this topic), but after I thought about it some more, I realized that I should not say that definitively. Since the victim didn’t even realize she had been raped initially, there was not a hospital visit for a rape kit or blood work, as I understand it, within the period when there would have been conclusive evidence from these tests. That’s why I thought I should back off saying she had been drugged as a 100% proven statement.
Does Tennessee require juries to be unanimous in convictions? Do jurors have to fill out questionnaires? Online news sources describe the jury selection process very vaguely, but they do mention jurors being asked if they knew anyone who has been a victim of sexual assault. If the juror did not state on the questionnaire or under questioning that she herself had experienced a sexual assault, that looks…deliberate. And thus not impartial from the start.
“I think it is simply wrong to think that the families are to blame in any way. I’m sure they did the best they could to raise their kids and they are entitled to their grief at what their sons did and the fact that they will be going to prison for decades. I”
I happen to agree with this. You can do everything to raise a kid right, and some kids are just going to be bad seeds and it isn’t because the parents failed to teach them right from wrong. I absolutely cannot imagine the cognitive dissonance of a son that I’ve loved for years and years since he was an innocent little boy doing something this heinous, and I don’t know how a parent could just turn off their love even if they had incontrovertible proof of the son doing something awful. Love and emotions are complicated that way.
One thing that really horrified me is that Vandenburg and the victim had consensual sex the following day (before she had any idea what had happened the night before) as part of his attempt to cover up the whole thing. He told her she had gotten really sick and that he spent the night taking care of her and cleaning up the big mess she had made. I hate him.
It is true that if the campus police had not seen the footage while investigating a completely unrelated matter that this whole thing might never have come to light.
We’ve spent a lot of time discussing this case at work and at social events, as you can imagine. It is our community and everyone is struggling to understand how this could happen and how these young men could be so awful.
Not that the answer is particularly relevant to the main issues, but how was it discovered that a juror had been a rape victim?
@PG I agree completely and would love my son even if he had done something as terrible as what is described in this case. I would love him because I know another side of him and because he and I were the same person for 9 months. I would know there was a lot of “good” in him as well. People make mistakes and sometimes the consequences are severe. And then I would think of all those who did the same and got away with it. Life is not fair.
@MOWC that it just awful about the “next day.” If that is factual then I would agree with you that this boy is deeply disturbed.
@2VU0609 yes I heard that the victim was drugged on that CNN segment. Agree that it has not been substantiated anywhere else.
I’m not sure how it got discovered that the juror is a rape victim. I suspect she was interviewed after the verdict and said something.
It is factual about the consensual sex the following day. Both the victim and Vandenberg testified to it.
Read this story. Toward the end it shows that Vandenburg got himself into more legal trouble last summer. He sounds like a violent person.
New news here- apparently the juror who was a victim of sexual assault is the male jury foreman. He claims no similarity to the situation here and that he did not misrepresent anything. Here’s hoping.
^^^^Wow, I sure was guilty of “assuming” the victim was female. And I’m someone who has a male distant family member who was raped in college by another male!
I think we all assumed that!
ABC 20/20 covered the case tonight. The show was extremely well done and very disturbing. One new piece of information is that the juror was the victim of statutory rape, which is really a totally different situation and I’m more confident that the verdict won’t be thrown out. It was the convicted rapist himself (the statutory rapist) who came forward. He spent 6 years in jail.
Some video footage was shown tonight that had not been shown outside the courtroom before. It was tough to watch.
MomofWildChild, thanks for the heads up. A Very powerful show about a very disturbing case.
Yes, thanks MOWC.