Juries constantly veer between trying to read the defendant’s guilt or innocence on the one hand, and listening to the evidence presented, on the other. They do this automatically, but to different degrees and in different patterns, depending on the people and circumstances.

They can't resist attempting to read the personality of the defendant, no matter the judge’s instructions to stick to the facts. The tendency is so deeply embedded, they could no more stop it than they could stop breathing. They certainly did it with Michael Jackson. They saw him as a bizarre personality, and likely a child molester.

What's terrific is that they judged Jackson not on their intuition, but on the evidence. Under our legal system we hope that juries will have the intelligence and judgment to do just that, put the testimony before their “people read.” The Jackson jury members actually put their fore-brains first, and their people reads second”, and came in with a verdict based on the actual evidence, or lack thereof. While they acknowledged that Jackson may have been guilty, they followed the law by determining whether guilt was proven beyond a reasonable doubt. They saved their primary people-reading for the witnesses, where it belongs. They found the prosecution’s testimony to be flawed and unreliable. Fair enough. The acquittal was justified.

Contrast this with the O.J. verdict some years ago, in which the jury appeared to have “read” the case strictly along racial lines; or the Scott Peterson case, in which circumstantial evidence was seen as damning given the defendant’s apparent profile as a psychopath, and the fact that the victim was an appealing, pregnant woman.

Peterson and Jackson may well have done the things they were accused of; conceivably, O.J. did not. Even more important is the question of whether the trials were fair ones. In the Michael Jackson case the jury got the process right. We should celebrate the fact that they stuck to the evidence, and didn't convict merely because they read him as tragically weird.