It seems the jury in the case of Southwest Airlines vs. the verbally abusive very fat woman who happens to be black came back with a resounding NOT GUILTY. Here's the story, courtesy of the Portsmouth Herald...

PORTSMOUTH - Nadine Thompson said she did not get a jury of her peers when an all-white jury on Friday ruled that Southwest Airlines did not discriminate against her for being black. But Lance Hellman of Portsmouth, a juror in the case, said race had nothing whatever to do with the verdict.

Thompson, a cosmetics executive from Exeter, said Monday she would not appeal the verdict because she said has no desire to again be characterized in public "as a fat, black, foul-mouthed ghetto momma. It was the most humiliating thing I’ve ever gone through in my life."

A U.S. District Court jury of eight people deliberated for just over an hour Friday before finding against Thompson.

In 2003, Thompson, who is significantly overweight, boarded a Southwest Airlines flight in Manchester. She was asked to leave her seat, under the airline’s "customer of size" policy, and talk to airline officials in the airport lobby about buying two tickets to accommodate her size. There, according to testimony, she became verbally abusive and was escorted out of the airport by sheriff’s deputies.

During testimony, Southwest Airlines employees said they did make a mistake in the way they asked her to leave the plane, but they never used racist words and were concerned solely with her weight.

Nadine Thompson Exeter resident who sued airline

Hellman said he knew nothing about the case when he was first seated on the jury, and on first seeing her "I had a great deal of sympathy for her. Here was this overweight black woman being picked on by the big airline. It was kind of a David vs. Goliath thing, I thought. And I’ve always been partial to David."

He said it was true that of the 100 potential jurors called to the district courthouse that day, he did not see people of color "but that’s a fair sampling of New Hampshirites."

Over the course of the four-day trial, he said it "became apparent to me that she didn’t have a case. She was trying to make an issue of race and it was really her weight," he said. When the jurors were finally able to deliberate, Hellman said, it became quickly apparent that everyone felt the same way he did.

He said he was particularly swayed by the testimony of the employee who asked her to leave the plane and whom she subsequently called "a racist motherf*****."

"I could sympathize with her anger. But she lost it," he said.

When Thompson said afterward that there was "no one to advocate for race," he felt it implied he was racist. "Nothing could be further from the truth."

Lance Hallman Juror from Portsmouth

But Thompson said that wasn’t at all what she meant.

"I honor and respect that he did the best he could. I respect that all of the jurors did the best they could," she said.

"But it was not a jury of my peers. There wasn’t even an ethnic minority there to advocate for me."

Hellman, who said he would be glad to meet Thompson and talk with her, said he felt in the final analysis that she should consider looking within herself.

"I am sympathetic for the underdog. And I can understand her not wanting to feel undervalued. But I think she has some growing to do."



The plaintiff's response?

To complain that she didn't get a jury of her peers. Never mind that I think you'd have a hard time finding a black person in New Hampshire at all. According to the 2000 census, the state of New Hampshire is 96% white. 96%. That means that the remaining 4% is divided amonst blacks and African Americans (0.7%), American Indian and Alaska native (0.2%), Asian (1.3%), Native Hawaiin and other Pacific Islander (<0.1%), some other race (0.6%) and two or more races (1.1%).

Did you get that? 99.3% of New Hampshire is non-black, and she's mad because she thinks she didn't get a jury of her peers.

HONEY!!! YOU GOT EXACTLY A JURY OF YOUR PEERS IN NEW HAMPSHIRE!!!

What you did NOT get is a jury of your peers in Atlanta or Charlotte or Detroit or Montgomery.

There are 1,235,786 New Hampshirians, or at least there were according to the 2000 Census. Based on the percentages, that's only 86,505.02 black people. In the entire state.

In 2004, there were 20,786 citizens in Portsmouth, Maine. And the breakdown there was a whopping 2.7% black. That means that there were only 561 black residents in Portsmouth at all. Given that, say, 1/3 were kids under the voting age, that knocks the number down to about 375. And if you divide jury duty up into 52 weeks, there were only seven available black jurors that week at all, and that assumes that they all showed up instead of opting out, being sick, having to work or travel, etc. And given the fact that statistically somewhere between 15 and 35% of people that get called don't show up, that knocks the number down further to around 4 or 5.

That's right. This woman's mad because the city wasn't able to bring all five eligible, available and called jurors for that week and put them on HER JURY (and it STILL wouldn't have been half of the panel).

If you ask me, if her jury had come up with four or five black people on it and I'd have been the airlines' attorey, I'D have been screaming about the jury not being a representative sample of the population.

So please woman, for the love of Christ, shut your hole and leave us all alone!!!