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.”

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