Representing the defendant: the president of Uganda

When I served on a jury a few months ago, the defense attorney in the case bore a strong resemblance to Forest Whitaker.¹

The whole jury thought so.²

On the first day of the trial, we jurors were sent out of the courtroom for a short recess with instructions not to talk about the case.

And we didn't.

However, we did spend a good deal of time discussing the Forest Whitaker look-alike. People were dying to get this observation off their chest, since gossip during the voir dire the previous day had focused only about whether Chris Wallace of Fox News would be discarded from the jury pool.<sup>3

1</sup>Whitaker just won an Academy Award last week, which makes this tale timely. I had been waiting for Whitaker to get into the news as an excuse to bring up this story, which I forgot to jot down at the time.
²Uncharacteristically for a D.C. petit jury, there were only two black people out of 14. Both of them agreed about the Forest Whitaker resemblance.
³Wallace was indeed discarded.

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