Same thing happened to me years ago. It was a stolen credit card case. A young kid, who was Hispanic but American born, had picked up his older brother's car, which had been in storage for a year while he was away at college, and was bringing it home for him. He got stopped for a broken tail light and the cops found a bunch of credit cards on the floor in the back. Now his brother vouched for the fact that the car had been in a friend's garage for the past year and that he had asked his brother to pick it up for him. They did not find the kids prints on the cards (note that the brother couldn't have taken them since they were reported stolen while he was away at college). Note that the police never tried to track down the guy who actually owned the garage.
Anyway, it was 11 votes for acquittal, but one guy refused to accept the idea that the state had failed to make its case. His position was that the kid was a Mexican and that was all that he needed to know. The prosecutor never retried the case. In fact, I think the Assistant DA was happy that it ended the way it did because we got the impression that she had been ordered by her boss to prosecute this case, but you could tell that even she seemed to feel that the evidence was literately nonexistent and that the police had failed to follow-up checking out the story (you could tell by the tone of her voice when she questioned the police officers).
Years later I got rejected as a juror on another trial, a manslaughter case, by the defense attorney simply because I had once served on a hung-jury (he implied that this experience would taint my ability to serve on any future jury).
The last time I got called to jury duty I did get impaneled, but the case got postponed the morning that the trial was supposed to have started. This was a rather significant drug case that I can't recall if it ever made it to court.
OCU
| 
