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Highlands Today

Age Shouldn't Be Considered When Deciding Guilt Or Innocence

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Highlands Today staff

Published: October 18, 2007

A local jury provided that "wow" verdict and let David A. Will out of jail after finding him not guilty of shooting his wife.

No one disputed that the gun he fired hit her in the arm, shattering the bone, which required surgery.
No one disputed that he fired the gun because she was going to call authorities for spousal abuse.
No one disputed that his home had other bullet holes from when he was trying to "scare" her.

And no one disputes that on two other occasions he was arrested for domestic abuse in 1995 and 2004. But apparently his age had everything to do with the verdict, and that's just not right.

Will, 83, was found not guilty in a Highlands County courtroom Tuesday on second-degree murder charges — or even attempted manslaughter or attempted battery. The defendant, his attorney and the prosecutor all figure his age and feebleness played a role in the jury's verdict.

It's true that Will's health is not great. He most likely would have died in jail if he had been sentenced for a lengthy time. The question, though, is should that matter to a jury? Shouldn't someone who shoots his wife because he wants to scare her from calling the police pay some kind of price? Of course. But not in this case.

None of us were in on that jury, so maybe they were limited in what they knew about past spousal abuse. Perhaps they bought the testimony from this trial, which differed from what he said earlier. An earlier trial ended with a hung jury.

We believe in the jury system. It's a tough job and it's never as easy as people sitting outside the jury box think it is. But sometimes evidence is so obvious that non-jurors cannot believe someone gets off without some kind of conviction. O.J. Simpson had the "dream team" and jurors star-struck by his celebrity status. Will apparently had his age and a sympathetic jury.

No one argues that he's an innocent man now. A jury said so and there's no going back to criminal court on those charges. Civil litigation likely awaits him, though. But even if he is found responsible and has to pay financially for his deeds, it doesn't change the fact that he was let go basically out of sympathy.

Let's hope the "wow" verdicts are few and far between. These kinds of verdicts make all of us a little more skeptical about our justice system.

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