canyonwalker | What Happened at that Murder Trial? (Reply)

Last month my jury duty service brought me to the courtroom where a murder trial was being conducted. I was not selected for the jury. Dozens of us were dismissed even before being interviewed in the process called voir dire. Once my service as a prospective juror ended I remained curious about the case. I started searching for news about the murder, the victim, and the goings-on in the trial. I found...next to nothing. There was no local news coverage about the trial. For a murder!

I thought about it again today. It's been a few weeks since I last went looking. It's now past the point where the judge predicted the trial would be complete. Again I've found next to nothing. Five (scraps of) Things I did find:

The superior court's online records are laughably poor. Like, "Welcome back to the internet circa 1998" poor. It's silly that Santa Clara County, the literal home of Silicon Valley, has such primitive IT.

The records don't indicate what verdict was rendered, or even explicitly if a verdict was rendered. I can only surmise that the two defendants were convicted of something as the records show sentencing hearings scheduled 3 months from now.

With multiple searches, both on Google and on the major local newspaper's own site, I found only two articles about the murder. One was from February 2021, shortly after it occurred; the other from March 2021, when the defendants were charged.

There is zero news coverage of the trial. Yes, I consider my searching fairly specific. I know the full names of the defendants, the victim, and the judge, plus the name of the venue where the trial occurred. Zero.

There is no news coverage of the victim. The two articles I mentioned above identify him only by name and age. There's no mention of where he lived, what his job was, who his grieving friends and family are, etc.

The news vacuum around this case reminds of something I read in a lengthy news piece a few years ago about the confessions of a serial killer. He noted that he got away with so many murders because the authorities, the news, and the public at large didn't care about the people he murdered. Once the victims were tied— rightly or wrongly— to drug gangs, the authorities stopped searching so hard, the news stopped reporting it, and people moved past it. It was like, "Oh, another alleged drug trafficker got killed, nothing to see here."

Was the victim in this case associated with illegal drugs— or anything else illegal, immoral, or unpopular? I don't know; I can't find any details! But it was stated in the charges of the trial that the defendants are alleged gang members and allegedly committed the murders as part of a gang. But more than that, I don't know. And I only know that because I was in the room when the judge read the charges. That's more than can be said for the news media, apparently.