John Goodman was supposed to get sentenced on Monday. He could have gotten 30 years in jail for killing Scott Wilson in a drunk-driving accident in 2010. The jury found him guilty.
But that same jury is what's standing between Goodman and his sentence -- jurors have come forward twice this week and revealed potential misconduct, the most recent instance involving some questions about the fact that there was proof at the trial that Goodman had only three or four drinks before the crash.
Juror Dennis DeMartin heard that during the trial and wanted to find out what it meant -- so he drank three vodka tonics, got lost in his condo complex, and decided Goodman must have been too drunk to be driving, using this information to inform his verdict vote.
How do we know this? He wrote it in a self-published book, then gave a copy to the Sun-Sentinel yesterday.
"It was bothering me that if there was proof that if Mr. Goodman only had 3 or 4 drinks, how drunk would he be? How drunk would I be? I decided to see," DeMartin wrote, with echoes of Hemingway. It was at this point he had three drinks, got "confused," then went to bed.
He says he woke up "relieved," because "the question in my mind the night before was answered to me." If DeMartin got confused after drinking three vodkas, his logic seems to go, then surely that means Goodman is guilty of manslaughter.
You can pick up a copy for yourself for $9.99, but Amazon says the thing is 32 pages long and made of standard letter-sized paper. And if the book is written like the online book description, you'd probably rather go to jail than get all the way to chapter 11.
No word yet on whether DeMartin is going to write a chapter 12 covering how a convicted killer got his verdict thrown out because some guy thought it would be cute to take his loose grasp of the English language and an even looser grasp of biology and weave them into a lovely case of jury misconduct for Goodman's lawyers.
Maybe he could co-author it with fellow juror Michael St. John, who said in court Monday that he voted guilty only because he felt his "voice didn't mean anything." The two could expand it into a criminal justice textbook.
