Merwin Case Tried Jurors’ Emotions

The 12 jurors looked shaken, pale and physically ill as they handed down their guilty verdict.

They had just spent a week looking at photographs of a dead 2-year-old boy - his curly blond hair hiding the fatal injury to his brain.

They watched as the boy’s parents sobbed in the courtroom. They listened as the man accused of abusing the toddler proclaim his innocence.

When it was all over, a few almost seemed to sprint from the room.

“There was nothing easy about this trial,” said Timothy Hunt, a 53-year-old professor from Hayden Lake and a juror in the Kevin Merwin trial.

Jury duty is never a simple task. But last week’s trial deciding whether Merwin fatally injured the child was one of the most grueling and heart-wrenching cases jurors have had to decide here in recent years.

“I haven’t sat through one with more emotions,” said Chuck Gerhard, the Kootenai County bailiff assigned to the jury during the trial.

In almost any case, jurors must delve through complex legal terms, piles of evidence and hours of testimony. They must determine what is true and what is false as lives hang on their decision.

Judges and bailiffs tell of seeing jurors in past cases weeping and shouting as they struggled with their decisions. One Kootenai County juror even locked herself in a bathroom and refused to come out.

George Hensley, a 55-year-old logger from Dalton Gardens, had been looking forward to jury duty. It wasn’t until the second day of the Merwin trial that he realized the emotional torture he was in for.

The case was far from clear-cut. The accused man was the only witness. The case hinged on the sometimes conflicting medical opinions.

The courtroom was crowded with friends and family members of both the dead boy and the accused man. Their stares were a heavy burden.

Hensley felt sorry for Merwin as he chokingly insisted he had not injured the dead boy. Gloria Kenna, a 64-year-old grandmother, was torn my the mother’s testimony.

Then there were the photographs.

“When you see the picture of a dead child, you don’t see the dead child, you see your own child,” Hunt said.

The jurors tossed and turned at night. “I think we averaged about four or five hours of sleep a night,” Hunt said.

Hensley felt sick as he and other jurors came back to the crowded courtroom with their guilty verdict. He listened to the sobbing and wailing of Merwin’s family after the verdict was read.

“It was one of the worst feelings I’ve ever had,” Hensley said.

After the trial, Hunt quickly contacted his own children even though they are now adults. “I just wanted to make sure they were OK.”

Hensley sought out his grandchildren. “I wrestled around with the grandson and then I started feeling a little better.”

But the trial’s effects still linger.

“It is difficult to look across a room and see a 2- or 3-year-old blond, curly-headed child,” Kenna said. “It will take time to get over.”

, DataTimes