Last Friday saw the end of my 9-day stint on the juror’s bench. I had told you about the experience on that first day. And I told you know how that experience ended.

As luck would have it, I was balloted from the group who went into deliberation. I didn’t know the verdict until today when I called up the Department of Public Prosecutions but I won’t tell you about that yet. Not until I tell you about the case itself, which was a case of sexual assault that happened in January 2008.

In a nutshell, and in point form:

• A woman got drunk at an acquaintance’s home. She went along with the acquaintance and the acquaintance’s friends to Fremantle for more drinking and clubbing. As they progressed from Rosie O’Grady’s and then on to The Clink nightclub, she got even more drunk.
• She was ejected from The Clink for being too drunk, and ended up sitting on the public stools just outside the club. The group she was with gave her a bottle of water and left her to her own devices.
• Two men came along and started talking to her. At this point, no one could be sure exactly about what happened. She either walked with them to the men’s car, or she was helped along, possibly carried or lifted.
• They drove somewhere and parked. Unprotected sexual intercourse with one man, and unprotected oral sex with the other occurred. After it had completed, she was left by the verge and the men drove off.
• She was lying on the ground for a few minutes before she woke up and walked in a daze towards another street corner where she fell asleep next to a lamp post. Two women passing by in their car saw her and tried to rouse her. When they couldn’t, and because of her disheveled appearance they called for the police and ambulance.
• When she was being helped into the ambulance, she started screaming that she had been raped. But she remembered nothing about it – about what happened in Fremantle, and how she came to be in that part of Fremantle where she was found. She only knew she was raped because of how she felt down there and what she tasted in her mouth.

And so that’s where the case began. DNA collected from the woman’s body and mouth led police to the first man (we were never told but us jurors think that the police got him because they had his DNA record from a drink-driving charge), who then implicated the other. The older man was married to the younger one’s sister – they were brother-in-laws.

The men admitted to having sex with the woman, and that she gave consent and was a willing partner. The prosecution argued that she was too drunk to give consent. They brought in witnesses to describe how drunk she was. These included her acquaintances on that night, whom I might add I felt distaste for because of how they left their friend to fend for herself, and the bouncers and the door man at The Clink.

A professor of pharmacology who headed the forensics lab that analysed the woman’s blood, which had a blood-alcohol level of more than 0.22% about 5 hours after she was kicked out of The Clink, gave his professional opinion of what a person with that much alcohol would be like, what they can or cannot be capable of, and how they’d behave. Under cross-examination by the defense, the professor conceded that a heavy drinker can seem to be lucid and functioning and therefore can mistakenly believed to be giving consent. Another side effect of high levels of alcohol is that long term memory never gets formed which explains the woman not remembering anything.

The defense argued that the prosecution cannot conclusively prove that consent was never given. They tried to imply the woman was a heavy drinker and that it is possible for her to have given consent even if she normally wouldn’t, and then completely forgotten about it due to the alcohol and that is why she cried rape. They have argued that what the men did may be morally reprehensible – having sex with a woman and then just leaving her by the road side – but it wasn’t a crime.

It all boiled down to consent.

I have not revealed much about the accused and the complainant because I had wanted you to form an opinion of the case in the absence of any kind of preconceptions and prejudices. But obviously that doesn’t work in the real world.

The two men are Iraqis and the woman is white and is a 39 year old mother of three, and who is now separated from her husband. As jurors we are supposed to be impartial and to base our decisions purely on the facts presented. Though not surprisingly on that first day of jury duty I saw a pattern in the kind of jurors that the defense lawyers rejected: mainly white and mainly blue-collar working class types whom they probably perceive to have negative views about Arabic folk, but interestingly, not women.

Some of the women in my juror team had commented that the complainant should not have gotten herself so vulnerable in the first place, and was almost blaming her for bringing it onto herself.

The older types including both men and women had commented that “they”, meaning people of Middle-Eastern origin, do not fit well into our society and do not assimilate. I don’t think their comments stem from racism as much as from what they can see in day to day life, an example of which I had mentioned before here.

The judge’s strict instructions to us in his summation, and which the defense lawyers emphasised repeatedly and greatly during their closing arguments, was that by bringing these allegations the State has the burden of proof, and these allegations must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

In my mind, the State failed to do so. The evidence were very circumstantial and as is probably normal in a rape case, involved a lot of he-said she-said. And because sending people to jail and marking them as sex offenders for the rest of their lives is serious stuff, I had to be 100% convinced by the prosecution’s arguments of which I wasn’t.

So I was going to vote “not guilty”. But I perceive that I was probably in the minority and would have relented in the end due to the need for a unanimous decision.

And I was right: the men were found guilty. Thus ends the entire sorry affair and a lot of what-ifs that I had formulated in my head:

• if only she didn’t get so drunk
• if only she didn’t go out with a bunch of people who couldn’t be bothered with looking after her
• if only the two men weren’t tempted by an easy lay
• if only they’d use condoms
• if only they didn’t park in a place with CCTV cameras where the woman can be seen lying on the ground and then walking unsteadily afterwards

There are at least 3 families whose lives are forever marred, and although a case was fought, there are no real winners at all.