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The Campside Media

When Ben Goldsmith took a manual fare's case in August 2012, he knew the odds were not

in his favor.

This belief was based on statistics, the vast majority of criminal charges end with a

defendant pleading guilty before trial.

And a recent study estimated that more than three-quarters of violent felonies that do reach

a trial end with guilty verdicts.

Then there were the compounding factors.

A manual fare was a young black man in a system that has been historically and overwhelmingly

unkind to young black men.

Moreover, the prosecution had presented evidence that a manual fare's DNA was in the midst

of the crime scene.

And Ben and his team had not contested that evidence.

They only sought to place it into the proper context.

So when the jury four women stepped forward to tell the judge, she and her 11 peers were

deadlocked.

Ben was relieved.

Because I felt like the jury had been out so long the chances of the coming back

not guilty was just getting increasingly small.

So it was sort of a feeling of living to fight another day.

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