by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D., The New American:

For several years I practiced law. I was counsel to many people who’d been indicted by a grand jury and subsequently tried before a jury, a jury tasked with deciding the guilt or innocence of my client.

As any litigator will tell you, going to court is at best a dice roll. There is no way to tell — despite the proliferation of professional jury consultants — to predict which way a jury will go in a given case. I’ve personally sat there with my client, convincing him that his innocence was obvious to anyone who’d heard the evidence, only to have a jury file back into a courtroom and pronounce a guilty verdict. Likewise, I’ve been certain that my client would be escorted out of the courtroom in cuffs, only to hear “not guilty” pronounced by the jury foreman.