Thirty-seven minutes. That’s all it took. After thirty-seven minutes of deliberation, a Kansas jury found Scott Roeder guilty of premeditated first-degree murder for the killing of Dr. George Tiller. Of course, there was never any question that he did it. The issue was whether the jury would buy his religious justifications for the act. They didn’t.
Anti-choice zealots tried to turn the trial into a referendum on abortion itself, but it just didn’t happen, and the judge refused to allow the jury to consider “justifiable manslaughter” as a possible verdict. The result was almost like a scene from the old Saturday Night Live “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer” sketch, where the jury would be dismissed to deliberate: they would look at …
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