Juror Jake Bibb Would have Convicted Söring Anyway
An archive find from 1996 deflates one of Team Söring's favorite arguments.
When asked about his case, Jens Söring makes a two-part argument. about the bloody sock-print LR3 found in the Haysoms’ living room:
First, He claims he couldn’t have left the bloody sock-print.
You can judge for yourself how well the sockprint fits Söring’s foot by looking at this excerpt from a 2007 German documentary about the case:
Second, he claims a juror said the bloody sock-print was the most important piece of evidence of Söring’s guilt. To support this claim, he points to the affidavit of Jake Bibb, a juror on Söring’s trial, who claimed that the sockprint was the piece of evidence which ultimately convinced the jury, which was initially split 6-6. Yet the sockprint, Söring assures us, was junk science. Söring obtained affidavits from his own experts, who declared that the sockprint did not point to any specific person, and that Elizabeth Haysom could have left it.
Now Söring’s argument is complete: Because the jurors placed great weight on the sockprint, and it was allegedly unreliable, Söring would not have been convicted if the jurors knew the “truth” about the sockprint, as argued by Söring and his experts.
Would these arguments about the unreliability of the sockprint have changed Jake Bibb’s mind? If only somebody had contacted him later, confronted him with the arguments against the sockprint, and gotten his reaction.
As it turns out, somebody did.
While researching my upcoming book on the Söring case, I delved into older versions of Jens Söring’s website to get an idea how it had evolved over the years. A 2004-era version of the website included a link to an article written by Ian Zack of the Charlottesville, Virginia Daily Progress called “Trial and Error”.
This article is one of the earliest fruits of the efforts of Söring and his lawyer Gail Marshall to attract attention to his case. At this early stage, the “Söring was convicted based on the junk science of the bloody sockprint” was a mainstay of all pro-Söring arguments. Zack decided to look into it:
Two of the 12 jurors who convicted Soering confirmed that the bloody sock print was crucial to deliberations. One, Jake Bibb, also provided an affidavit to Marshall.
Bibb said in his June 26, 1995, affidavit that the jury was split 6-6 when it began deliberations, and “had it not been for the sock print and the testimony concerning it, I for one would have found it more difficult, if not impossible, to place [Soering] at the scene of the crime.”
In 1990, days after the trial ended, Bibb said, “If it had not been for that footprint, I would have found him innocent.”
Shortly after the trial, juror Mack Coleman also said the print “definitely gave [Soering] away.”
Reached by telephone at his Roseland home last week, Bibb said he still believes in Soering’s guilt, despite the unintroduced testimony.
Statements by jurors are inadmissible in U.S. courts, since the only statement by jurors that matters is the collective statement about guilt or innocence, which they render in court after swearing a formal oath. The Bibb affidavit was, therefore, never important. But now we know that even if Bibb had heard the challenges to the sockprint, he would still have convicted Söring.
https://n.b5z.net/i/u/7000525/f/SockenSchuabdruck/IV_C_1_Affidavit_by_Juror_Jake_Bibb.pdf
IMO Jake Bibb took his job as a juror very seriously. In his affidavit he stated that the job of the commonwealth/jurors was to place Soering at the scene by evidence. Without the footprint as evidence, which could fit to Soering, you only have blood 0 without a subtype. So you only have his confession with some details which fit to the crimescene. Also many differs. Honestly it seems a bit senseless to have the job as a juror to convict Soering, who is talking about another female killer for the first time, having no chance to see how the key witness would react to her fitting shoe imprint, senseless alibi story (missing ticket for RHP), blood B, showering, her cash made of selling jewels and other serious things Neaton could not ask her in his examination. 🤷