Guess Who Was Called For Jury Duty in Manslaughter Case

HERKIMER, NY — The last person anyone would have expected to be called as a juror in the manslaughter trial of Matthew Lewis was Matthew Lewis himself. Yet Lewis, 23, broke the odds of that unlikely probability when he received a summons for jury duty Monday in Herkimer County Court on the same day his trial was scheduled to begin in connection with the October 2009 drunken driving crash that killed two of his friends.
There was no trial Monday, since Lewis instead decided to plead guilty. But both the defense and prosecution attorneys agreed that such a coincidence is unlike anything they’ve ever seen before.“It’s probably one of the most ironic things that could possibly happen,” said Lewis’ attorney, George Aney, as he showed the jury duty summons with Lewis’ name on it.
After bringing the summons to the court’s attention, Aney said he plans on asking a local college to calculate the odds of a defendant being summoned to sit as a juror in his own trial considering the county’s population.
Obviously, Lewis would never have been picked to sit as his own juror, so the summons would have had little or no impact on the case, Herkimer County District Attorney John Crandall said.Nevertheless, Crandall said the occurrence was more than unusual – “It’s a lot unusual,” he quipped.
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