Cirignano - Not Guilty

I had jury duty a few months ago, and it was an assault charge that was tried. The defendant did punch the guy's lights out, he even testified that he did, but the instructions we got from the judge included the concept that the charge embodied the act of assaulting someone for no reason. In this case, the guy had been grabbing the defendant's girlfriend, and hitting on her all night at a bar. There was much, much more to the case but the deciding factor in whether we, the jury, were going to give that defendant a conviction for assault was the for no reason caveat. We found him not guilty of the assault charge.

So, if you're ever in a situation where you have the idea that nobody can touch you, be clear about the situation you're in. People can touch you and they can get pretty rough about it... but it's illegal to intentionally do it for no reason.

I suspect that the jury in the Cirignano case, after having been made to suffer their free service to the Commonwealth for days on end, needed to separate out the politics of the case and focus on the actual charges, what they actually mean, and the finer points of whether somebody took a spill as a result of Mr. Cirignano's innate desire to push people around for no reason, OR if the situation embodied complex interactions that precluded the opportunity for the jury to come in with a verdict of guilty without a shadow of a doubt.