Two things about this article stand out to me. (Read it now. It's short enough.) The first is the jury's guilty verdict and the jurors' apparent reluctance to return it.

What the jury did was extraordinary. They felt bad for the young woman, pregnant with her second child, and agreed that she had made a dumb, youthful mistake. Reluctantly, they convicted her of the felony. But the fine they imposed was her daily pay as a maid, $60. And then they took up a collection and gave her the money to pay the fine.

“The general sentiment was she was a victim, too,” said the jury foreman, Jeffery Memmott. “Two of the women [jurors] were crying because of how bad they felt. One lady pulled out a $20 bill, and just about everybody chipped in.” Memmott then contacted the public defender in the case, and went to the home of Sandra Mendez Ortega. He gave her the jury’s collection, which totaled $80.

“Justice had to be done,” said another juror, Janice Woolridge, explaining why the panel imposed a felony conviction. “But there’s also got be some compassion somewhere. Young people make bad decisions. We just couldn’t pile on any more.”

If the jurors unanimously agreed that the defendant was proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and unanimously agreed that "justice" required a felony conviction, then so be it. But that may not have been the case.

“We didn’t feel she should have been tried and convicted,” said Memmott, the foreman. “We tried every way we could to find some way of not convicting her. But the legal standard was very clear.” Two other jurors agreed that the felony conviction was appropriate, given the facts and the law.

But there was "some way of not convicting her" that all juries serving in criminal cases have: returning a verdict of "not guilty." "Jury nullification" refers to a jury's decision to find a defendant not guilty despite its unanimous conclusion that the government had proven the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Jurors are often told explicitly that they have no power to disregard the law, but the fact of the matter is that a not-guilty verdict cannot be challenged after it is returned, and the jury's basis for such a verdict cannot be examined.

Perhaps the jury in this case knew this, but still believed that a felony conviction was appropriate. But the sentiment presented in some of the quotes in the article suggest that this may not have been the case. You may have noticed that I've made several references to the requirement that a jury verdict must be unanimous. This is particularly important in a case like this one, where emotions clearly ran high. If even one of these jurors had refused to agree to a guilty verdict, then there would have been no conviction. (On the other hand, then there could have been a second trial where the defendant would have received a more substantial sentence.)

Jury nullification is such a controversial topic that it cannot even be mentioned during a criminal trial, and certainly not affirmatively presented to a jury by a judge during that judge's instructions to the jury. As I mentioned earlier, the power of nullification is not a "power" given to juries, but rather the practical result of such a verdict being immune to challenge. In addition, our country's history is filled with juries deciding to ignore the evidence and law presented to them, but with the result being the conviction - and sometimes the lynching - of innocent defendants. I am not privy, of course, to the negotiations and other factors that may have impacted the prosecution's decision to seek a felony conviction for this defendant, but the party with the clearest power to prevent a felony conviction in the case was clearly the prosecution, not the jury.

The second thing that stands out to me is the victim's response:

A happy holiday story, right? Well what if you’re the woman whose rings were stolen? Although she was not pleased when the jury returned from their deliberations with only a $60 fine for the felony conviction, crime victim Lisa Copeland was appalled when she learned that the jury had also paid the fine.

“I just pray that they’re never in my shoes,” Copeland said. She said Mendez Ortega never accepted responsibility for the theft. “If she had accepted accountability, I would be okay with all of this. The fact that she won’t accept accountability makes it wrong.”

Copeland said Mendez Ortega told a lies from the start and then unfurled a tragic life story that  convinced the jury to impose a punishment of a $60 fine. “I was outraged,” Copeland said. “I was just flabbergasted. I didn’t think $60 equated to the crime at all.” She did not know the jury had taken up a collection for Mendez Ortega until she was contacted by a reporter.

To be clear, the stolen rings were returned. And one of the effects of these incidents becoming criminal cases is that the honest remorse that a defendant feels doesn't get communicated to the victim. When that remorse was clear during the police investigation, though, the responsibility to see that remorse communicated to the victim should fall on the police or the prosecutor. That didn't happen here.

Mendez Ortega reportedly felt bad about the theft, admitted to her boss that she had the rings and turned them over to him. The police were contacted and Mendez Ortega confessed to them as well, saying she returned the rings after learning they were valuable. The police had her write an apology letter to Copeland, in Spanish, which said in part, “Sorry for grabbing the rings. I don’t know what happened. I want you to forgive me.”

Copeland said she has never seen that letter, and that Mendez Ortega has never apologized to her in person. “Never saw it,” Copeland said. “Never heard about it until the trial, during sentencing.”

To be fair, I've never, to my knowledge, been a victim of this type of offense. But I hope I would feel just a little bit more empathy. At the very least, I hope I would be able to recognize that others may be able to feel some.

Lisa Copeland was amazed. “The fact that she confessed,” she said, “and they didn’t want to convict her? I don’t get this. That’s basically saying it’s okay to steal.”

No, it's not saying that. Whether one's conduct is wrong is not dependent on whether one is convicted of a crime for that conduct.

Then during the sentencing phase, Mendez Ortega took the stand. She faced a possible sentence of up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $2,500. She told the jury she had dropped out of school after sixth grade, that she first became pregnant at 15,  that she was pregnant again at 19 and had no job, according to court records.

“The whole time she was telling the sob story,” Lisa Copeland said,

Happy new year.