These, I thought, were some of the key points made by this second juror:

“This was kind of like using the hand grenade on the horsefly. If you throw the book at this guy, then what do you do about — there are plenty of guys down there that are really bad guys that need to have the book thrown at them, but if you do a 30 [year] minimum [sentence], which was the prosecution’s request, and they would have preferred life, where do you step up from that?”

“In none of the evidence presented did you ever see him brandishing a weapon at all. Even when he was captured and the evidence all showed that there was an AK-47 right there in the front seat, the guys behind him and in front of him deployed weapons, he bailed out of the car and ran.”

In response to NPR asking the juror his feelings about the fact that “Hamdan is still classified as an unlawful combatant by the Bush administration, and as such could be detained indefinitely in spite of his short sentence. Lt. Col. Patrick said that the jury would be extremely annoyed if that happened. After all, he said, what did we come down here for?”