The Texas Monthly story is titled, “The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty.” Its tone is celebratory: a juror who made an unethical decision (though the writer attempts to mitigate it in many ways throughout his article) courageously decided to undo the wrong, and succeeded. Far from being impressed with the alleged ethics hero, Estella Ybarra, I found the story infuriating, and its conclusion that Ybarra should be admired untenable.
The story is in the familiar, long-form format familiar to readers of the New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair and The Atlantic. We are given more details about the lives of all the participants in a drama than we need as well as thick context about every facet of the tale. It can be summarized easily, however, and relatively quickly.
In 1990, when Ybarra was 48 years old, she served on a jury charged with determining the guilt of a Mexican-American man accused of rape. She was the hold-out juror, Henry Fonda in “Twelve Angry Men”; everyone else was certain Carlos Jaile (above) had raped an eight-year-old girl. Ybarra was not: she felt the evidence was thin. There was no physical evidence, the defendant had an alibi, and the main proof of his guilt offered was a child’s eyewitness identification after the fact. But, we are told, Estella was still learning English despite being born in the U.S. (Whose fault is that?) and didn’t understand the justice system very well. (Or that?). As a result, she allowed herself to be bullied into voting ‘guilty’ by the men on the jury, even though she was not at all convinced Carols Jaile was.
She went home after Jaile was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, and wept, we are told. This is supposed to make her seem sympathetic. Later, Estella received a certificate in the mail stating that by serving as a juror and “accepting this difficult and vital responsibility of citizenship in a fair and conscientious manner, you have aided in perpetuating the right of trial by jury, that palladium of civil liberty and the only safe guarantee for the life, liberty and property of the citizen.” Ybarra threw the document into a drawer. She told the writer, Michael Hall, that she thought to herself, “We sent an innocent man away for the rest of his life.”
But wait! There’s more! For the “guilty juror” heeded the calls of her conscience and took action that resulted in the innocent man being freed.
Thirty years later.
Yes, thirty years later, Ybarra came across the jury certificate, thought back on the trial, and having become “more assertive” and competent in her old age, decided to make some phone calls. One of them prompted the authorities to re-open the case, and it soon became clear that Carlos Jaile was innocent after all. Police had decided he was guilty and didn’t examine other suspects or leads. DNA evidence had been obtained that would have proven his innocence, but the prosecutor’s office never revealed it, as required by law. The 10-year-old eye witness was, as often happened in cases and sometimes still does, prodded by police to identify Jaile as the rapist. The defense lawyer did a poor job. And, though this is not given the same weight in the writer’s telling and was left out of the judge’s blistering opinion when he reviewed Jaile’s conviction, a civically ignorant juror lacked the strength of character to prevent a miscarriage of justice, which she had the power to do.
So it’s a happy ending. Jaile was released, though he has yet to be declared innocent officially, which would trigger a statutory cash award in the millions. Oh, his wife left him, not wanting to be married to a rapist. He lost his home. He and his wife were planning a family, but that dream died. He has no career, and he has no Social Security because he hasn’t earned a salary in 30 years. Carlos went into the courtroom in 1989 a young man with a promising future, and was released a penniless old one in 2019. His life is ruined beyond repair, yet he is portrayed as grateful to Estella Ybarra for preventing him from dying in prison, though she was complicit in putting her there.
He might as well be, I guess: after all, it could have been worse.
The article ends with a recounting of the emotional meeting between Carlos and Estella.
“If you didn’t do it, I would still be there.” [Carlos said] His voice was weak with emotion. “I am so grateful for everything you’ve done.”
“That’s good.”
“Thank you. Thank you, so much. You’re a wonderful person.” He was nodding and blinking tears from his eyes.
“I didn’t forget you,” she said, reaching for a napkin. Now she began to cry.
“Thankfully,” he said.
“Never,” she said, and she lifted her glasses and started drying her tears.
This exchange prompted a visceral reaction from me, and I was moved to look up Rationalization #35. The Tortoise’s Pass: “Better late than never” on the list. It reads,
“Indeed, when it comes to rectifying or ending unethical conduct, late is definitely better than never. This is, however, nothing but a particularly insidious employment of the worst of all rationalizations, #21, The Comparative Virtue Excuse or “There are worse things!” Late is also better than setting the neighborhood on fire, but finally doing what should have been done before harm resulted is nothing to be proud of, unless the agency taking ethical action never had the opportunity of ability to do it sooner. Yes, abolishing slavery in 1865 is better than never abolishing it at all, but the 13th Amendment doesn’t erase the wrong or relieve the accountability of allowing slavery to continue from 1776 until the ban. Absolutely, ending “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was long in coming and necessary, but it is still a disgrace that it took so long to end a disgraceful policy. The worst use of The Tortoise’s Pass, perhaps, is when it is used to excuse from just punishment women who knowingly sent innocent men to prison on their false accusations of rape, and who much later come forward to recant after an attack of conscience. It is true that if you are hitting me over the head with a brick, I am grateful when you stop, and whenever you stop, the end to my pain is appreciated. Don’t expect me to thank you, however, or to relieve you of the responsibility for the consequences due for hitting me at all.“
Carlos Jaile is a broken man, and Estella Ybarra helped break him. I would have more respect for him to add to my pity if he had spit in Estella’s face.
WordPress bot update: The WP AI is having quite a day. It told me that the story of this El Paso tragedy should be tagged “Great Expectations.” I know why. Do you?
Ethics Alarms 
I must ask one thing.
Why is it that wrongly convicted people never go on a revenge spree against any and all even tangentially involved?
That has never happened even once in the past sixty centuries or so.
Great question, ME. Surely it’s happened? That’s a not uncommon theme in horror movies and show like “Criminal Minds.” Now I’m curious….
Indeed.
I am surprised that absolutely zero of them blamed all humanity for what hapepned to them, and went on a terror campaign against humaniry itself (think of the protagonist in the ending of the novel Apt Pupil)
By extension, if he commits a crime with a sentence of 30 years or less of incarceration, can he plead guilty and be released for time served?
Of course.
“WordPress bot update: The WP AI is having quite a day. It told me that the story of this El Paso tragedy should be tagged “Great Expectations.” I know why. Do you?“
I had to look it up to confirm, since it’s been several decades since I read it, but “Estella” was the trigger.
Would have been better if Carlos had been named Pip.
Magwitch would be better still.
Indeed. It took me a second too.
I was in a stage version of Great Expectations thirtysomething years ago. I suspect that it’s less likely that “Jaggers” will come up in stories very often, though.
Let’s see what happens next time I write about Mick…There’s a Mick Jagger tag!
Jack, I think you are underestimating how much peer pressure affects most humans. I’m not even sure how I would have handled that situation.
We’re talking about a Hispanic woman who grew up in the 40s and 50s, being drafted into a jury for a criminal case in English along with some aggressive males of pallor and nobody else willing to stand up with her.
You can still condemn Ybarra for backing down when she was fairly sure Jaile was innocent, but where’s the condemnation for the other jury members? Both the ones who probably also believed Jaile was innocent but likewise backed down, and the jurors who were all too vocal while abdicating their civic responsibility to examine the facts of the case as presented?
What about the police, who failed to perform a thorough investigation and presented an innocent man to be charged to create the illusion of effective law enforcement? What about the prosecution, who should have looked at the exculpatory evidence and refused to prosecute, and reported the police for malfeasance? What about the defense, who should have attacked all the weak points in the prosecution’s case to create reasonable doubt? What about the judge of the case, probably? What about the system of rules and incentives that rewards prosecutors for hiding exculpatory evidence and fails to punish them for doing so?
If the only person standing between an innocent man and a life ruined is a single juror, then the system has already gone horribly wrong and several people need to be severely punished. (I’ve made it clear before that I think that punishments within the limits of the Eighth Amendment are too lenient for public officials who abuse their authority by knowingly falsely convicting people.) To remain certain of a stranger’s innocence (or at least the existence of reasonable doubt) when a victim has pointed their finger at them, and to maintain that certainty when all other parts of the system have failed to see it, is beyond the vast majority of humans.
And once the conviction happens, then what? If Ybarra couldn’t hold up in the face of the rest of the jury, did you expect her to try to get the case reviewed immediately afterward? Why should she have any expectation that that would work, if the justice system had already failed once and she had already given in to it once? Yes, it would have been better if she had tried before, but that ignores the existence of learned helplessness. Most people don’t fight tooth and nail for something they’ve been browbeaten into surrendering once already. I’m not surprised it took her thirty years to develop the skills she needed to change the outcome and for the realization to crystallize that she now had those skills and could do something about it.
I believe the main concern here is what we can do to ensure this never agai happens to anyone again. For a prosecutor to charge someone despite having evidence of their innocence should be treated like first-degree murder, or corporations covering up health and safety hazards. But how do we more effectively monitor them for wrongdoing? Or can we somehow reward them for being conscientious rather than for maximizing the number of people they send to prison?
Read my other comment.
What would be wrong with Carlos Jaile going on a roaring ramoage of revenge against those who wronged him, regardless of what the law says?
If the law itself is broken, justice is impossible. All that is left is vengeance.
Lovely comment as usual, EC. But…
1) living in a democracy requires character and obligations. A jury is a microcosm of democracy, and a juror, each juror, is equally responsible as the last line of defense against injustice. She failed. If she didn’t have the integrity and courage to hold to her position, peer pressure of not, when a man’s life was on teh line, then she should have told the judge that she was incapable of doing the job.
2) She had lived her whole life in the US, and was not yet comfortable with English. Unforgivable. She was a failure as a citizen. She also didn’t understand the justice system. Ditto. The judge in his instructions explained what ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ was. She understood that much, and all she had to say was, ” don’t believe he’s guilty.” And keep saying it. Period. A jury can’t bully her: she can go to the judge. Hung juries happen all the time.
3) I mentioned all the other culprits in the case, but nobody’s painting them as heroes. If she believed her vote was coerced, she could have gone to the judge, who might have declared a mistrial. She should have consulted a lawyer. If she was going to wait, she should have blown a whistle at the earliest possible time—maybe when a new DA too over. 25 years would have been better. 15 years. 10 years. 5? There is no excusing 30 years, and she had forgotten about what she had done (according to the article) until she stumbled over the old certificate.
Sure, lots of unethical conduct by others put that innocent man in prison, but she had the last chance to stop the injustice, and didn’t. She could have made all the rest irrelevant. All she had to do is say “No.” It’s hard, but being a responsible member of a democracy is hard.
She has no honor.
She should commit seppuku.
The woman took over 40 years to fully grasp English, and now you want her to understand Japanese?
Living a life of honor has become abnormal and unfashionable. Our society seldom rewards or even recognizes the honorable, while there are myriad incentives for acting selfishly and expediently rather than honorably. Those among us who endeavor to live honorably are frequently scoffed at and thought of as chumps. We press on regardless.
A clear conscience is indeed a soft pillow.
I read this article a couple of weeks ago and it made my blood boil. I simply didn’t find the excuses the reporter made for Ybarra credible and do not believe that she couldn’t speak English well after 48 years of living in Texas and being educated from K-12 in English.
I also reject the article’s claim that, as a Hispanic woman, Ybarra felt subservient to the White men on the jury and felt obligated to go along with what they wanted. That doesn’t fit with the fact that the deliberations lasted over two hours. If she actually considered them her bosses, the jury should have returned a verdict much quicker.
Having said that, it’s pathetic that she caved after only a couple of hours. A man’s liberty was at stake.
Bingo. I felt this spin from the Texas Monthly was another version of the “Good illegal immigrant” stories we keep getting in the media. A Spanish-speaking Mexican-American natural born citizen is supposed to trigger our sympathy because mean white men “made” her complicit in ruining an innocent man’s life. After all, she cried about it afterwards, so we know she is a good person.
(At least) one other thing in that article rubbed me the wrong way. When Ybarra started about undoing some of the harm she’d caused, the journalist described the people originally involved in the case as having “lousy memories.”
Speaking as an appellate prosecutor, that is a ridiculous criticism to lob. It was 30 freaking years later, and the cops and lawyers involved would have handled thousands of cases in the interim. Any blame for “lousy memories” goes straight back to Ybarra, who did nothing for decades.
It makes me wonder about voir dire; how does a juror that doesn’t speak the language and is not sure what her obligations are get through voir dire?
Either it’s a new phenomenon or I’ve simply become more aware of it, but withholding Brady material from the defendant appears to be a regular practice. The role of the juror is heightened when such malfeasance is pervasive and prosecutors are seldom held to account.
Her inability to speak English persisted, and that sort of ignorance must be pursued; opportunities to better her English were undoubtedly available, but she chose to stay ignorant and solidify her identity as Hispanic first and an American citizen somewhere lower.
No one’s hands are clean here, save for the man who served 30 years in prison because every safeguard to protect defendants from a wrongful conviction failed.
You are forgetting that juries are chosen to exclude people with strong will. A friend of mine was called for jury duty. When he was interviewed for the first jury, he was berated by the DA when he stated that he would not feel comfortable convicting someone of drunk driving when the only evidence was a handheld breathalyzer (not considered exceptionally accurate) with no printout when the only person who saw the readout was the arresting officer. When asked why he wouldn’t just trust the officer, he replied with “If we have to just trust the officer, why do we need trials?” He was dismissed from that jury and from interviewing for any of the other juries that day. In and out in under an hour. I have never been called for jury duty and I wonder if it is because they look up my job and just decide not to bother. I would never be allowed on a jury.
I was allowed on a jury despite being a lawyer, and was the only one who believed that the defendant was in the right in a med mal case. They made me foreman, and I talked the whole jury into rejecting the plaintiff’s claim. You never know….
Maybe, but I think they don’t want someone with a presentation titled “How DNA Evidence Is Misinterpreted” on their hard drive and who wrote a book on common spectroscopic techniques to be on the jury.
It just seems that the justice system likes ignorance. When I looked at the Rittenhouse trial, it was shocking how much of the criminal justice system seems to be based on ignorance. The judge in that case seemed to expect that Rittenhouse would be acquitted of the murder charges, but convicted on the other firearms charges (my speculation). However, the judge didn’t bother to even look up the crimes Rittenhouse was on trial for until AFTER both sides has finished their cases. Only then did he realize that the charges were impossible for Rittenhouse to have committed. Not just that Rittnhouse didn’t do them, but that reality itself would have to be violated for him to commit them. I doubt the jury was given that information. The only reason the judge looked them up is because Rittenhouse was so insistent on the stand that his actions were legal while the Prosecutor insisted they weren’t. If the judge doesn’t know who is lying about what the law says, how can the jury be expected to know and make an informed decision? Do you think the jury would have been provided with a copy of the laws in question? We won’t know because the judge had enough morality not to send those charges to the jury. He did, however, send some new charges to the jury he researched, ones the defense never had a chance to defend against.
I also noted in that trial that when the prosecutor violated he judge’s orders, the jury was dismissed and not allowed to see the judge bring that up. I think it is very relevant for the jury to know when the prosecutor lies or does something underhanded. How can the jury know who to trust when untrustworthy behavior is intentionally hidden from them?