news-record.com

Sympathy isn't out of place in court, as long as it serves -- rather than denies -- the cause of justice.

N&R reporter Sonja Elmquist's accounts of a criminal trial last week captured the impact of powerful emotions on judge and jurors.

Christopher Brian Collins, 36, was found guilty Thursday in Guilford County Superior Court of committing 10 armed robberies in 2006 and 2007.

The case troubled Lisa Jones, the jury's forewoman, Elmquist reported.

"Jones said she felt pulled emotionally between the tearful testimony of frightened bank employees and the sight of Collins' 2-year-old daughter -- whom a guilty verdict would leave fatherless -- in the courtroom.

"Jones said she cried at home Wednesday night after the day's testimony, upset by what she had heard but not sure she could find Collins guilty."

The jury did find Collins guilty. Doing otherwise based on concern for his daughter would have put emotion before facts, sympathy ahead of jurors' sworn duty to the truth. The term for that is jury nullification.

Not that Jones was wrong to shed tears for the child. It's very likely that she will grow up without her father.

The next day, Judge Stuart Albright handed Collins 13 separate sentences that, running consecutively, add up to at least 100 years in prison.

"Why would you give me 100 years?" Collins asked Albright before being led away.

He should have known the answer. Albright explained before he pronounced sentence. Consideration for the victims of Collins' robberies was part of the reason.

"Not only, Mr. Collins, did you rob them, you terrorized them; you threatened them; you put guns to their heads," said Albright, a former Guilford County district attorney and now a no-nonsense judge in the mold of his father, Douglas Albright.

Collins offered an apology and worried how his family would get by without him.

We all should worry about that. The child is no less innocent and no less a victim than the people Collins robbed. But he put her in the position of living without a father -- not the jury and not the judge.

No one commits 10 armed robberies on an impulse. Collins chose a life of crime, one that began long before this series of robberies.

He was convicted in 1996 of robbing a bank in New York. "You were let out of prison and in a few years you committed the same crime," Albright said. "You just became a better criminal."

That's not all. Collins was convicted in Guilford County of misdemeanor breaking and entering and credit card fraud in 2005. He got a break: a suspended sentence and probation.

Unless his latest conviction and sentences are overturned on appeal, it looks like Collins' luck has run out.

If he tried to tug at jurors' emotions by having his daughter in court, the ploy didn't quite work.

It certainly didn't impress Albright, who scolded Collins during Friday's sentencing: "You included your 2-year-old daughter in at least one felonious conspiracy charge. Shame on you."

The statement referred to testimony that Collins had his daughter present when plotting a robbery -- not an example of good parenting.

In setting his punishment, it was more important to consider the bank employee who was forced into a vault by this man and didn't know if she'd get out alive. She said she "wakes up at night and can still see the gun pointed at her face," Elmquist reported. And the man who gave up his job at the bank because of the fearful experience. And all the others.

"Whatever he gets, he brought it on himself," prosecutor Bill Wood told the jury in his closing argument.

That should go without saying. Besides, except in capital cases where the jury can recommend a death sentence, jurors' work ends when they deliver a verdict.

The judge, within sentencing guidelines, decides the punishment. Collins' 100 years need not trouble any juror's conscience.

Jones, the forewoman, was honest enough to admit she struggled. She carried a huge weight of responsibility. Despite her misgivings, she and her colleagues ended up doing the right thing.

She told Elmquist: "Several of us kept saying, 'If he gets off ... if he does it again.' "

If the facts pointed to his guilt, the jury was bound to find him guilty.

The crimes warranted a severe penalty, all the more because of the impact on victims.

In an emotional case, judge and jury saw that justice was done.

Contact Doug Clark at dgclark@news-record.com or 373-7039.