How Many Years If You’re Acquitted?

The point of a trial is to separate the guilty from the not guilty.  Or so you thought.

From the New York Lawyer comes this fairy tale story of a 25 year old New Hampshire man who was tried and acquitted of assaulting a police officer while trying to get his pregnant fiancée to the hospital.  Yep, another pregnant woman on her way to the hospital story where they just didn’t show the cop enough respect.  After all, what’s more important.  Complying with the every whim of a police officer or getting a pregnant woman to the hospital.  You would think these pregnant women are, well, pregnant or something.  Sheesh.

Anyway, after a full and vigorous 15 minutes of deliberations, Nathaniel Gibbs was found not guilty.  And so, in the best fashion of American justice, Grafton County Judge Jean Burling found, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Gibbs was guilty of the crime for which he had just been acquitted.

No way?  Way.  You see, Gibbs received a suspended sentence in a prior case, and one of the conditions of that sentence was that Gibbs was required to maintain “good behavior.”

Burling she found by a preponderance of evidence that Gibbs’ assaulted an officer and disobeyed an officer — actions that violated the good behavior requirements of the previous suspended sentence.


So Nathaniel Gibbs fell into that little crack between burdens of proof and guilt and punishment.  It is essentially a given that when a violation of probation, or suspended sentence, or whatever it’s called from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, is based upon the allegation of the commission of a new crime, the disposition of the new case dictates the outcome of the old.  In other words, what happened here should never happen. 

While Judge Burling’s reasoning, her technical yet accurate application of the relative burden of proof, provides a basis to put Gibbs into the slammer, it is just so fundamentally wrong as to bring utter contempt to the legal system.  To put it nicely, it emits an unpleasant odor.

So for those inclined to believe that a trial is something we go through before putting a defendant in jail, you will be happy to know that in Grafton County, New Hampshire, nobody disrespects a police officer and gets away with it.  For everyone else, it would seem prudent to stay the hell out of Grafton County, New Hampshire.












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2 thoughts on “How Many Years If You’re Acquitted?”

  1. David

    Reminds me of my first jury trial victory. The jury was back with not guilty in 15 minutes, right when the judge was telling me how badly I did. My elation was short lived because, knowing this judge and his history, I asked the prosecutor the next day if he told her to charge it differently next time. She told me the judge told her that she should have added a “disorderly conduct” charge, which is a city ordinance, petty offense (carries six months or less) and that if she would have, he would have heard that charge and found my client guilty of that and maxed him, after the jury came back with not guilty.

    I felt like I helped one person but the judge taught the prosecutor a lesson she’ll use on hundreds of other people.

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