If employees of Dick's Sporting Goods had let former City Court Judge Leticia Astacio get any closer to buying a shotgun last April, the outcome of her trial this week may have been entirely different, a juror said on Saturday.

An Onondaga County jury of 10 men and two women on Friday afternoon found Astacio not guilty of a single charge of attempted criminal purchase or disposal of a weapon.

"Basically, we said Dick's Sporting Goods saved her life," said 26-year-old Tyler Woods, a Syracuse-area bank employee known as Juror No. 5 during Astacio's three-day trial before acting state Supreme Court Justice Gordon Cuffy. "We thought she really tried to convince the Greece employee to sell her a gun, but once he flagged her, she had no chance at all of purchasing the gun in Henrietta."

Astacio was criminally accused of trying to buy a shotgun at the Dick's store in Henrietta on April 2, 2018. As a condition of her probation for a driving while intoxicated conviction, she is prohibited from owning any dangerous weapons.

Her trial was moved to Onondaga County after appellate judges determined an abundance of local media coverage made a fair trial unlikely in Monroe County.

In court, an employee of the Greece Dick's location testified that Astacio visited his store earlier that day and that he had refused to sell her a weapon. That employee also testified that there's a general Dick's policy that if one store refuses to sell a weapon to a particular person, that person is flagged company-wide and no store will then provide that person a weapon. The Greece employee called workers at the Henrietta location to let them know he'd flagged Astacio, he told the court.

For Woods and other jurors, that meant that even if Astacio wanted and intended to buy a shotgun in Henrietta she did not come "dangerously close" to completing the purchase, as the criminal charge required if they were to find her guilty.

Under state law, for a person to be guilty of attempting to commit a crime he or she must engage in conduct that "comes dangerously close or very near to the completion of the intended crime." In Astacio's case, the alleged crime was an attempt to purchase a specific Mossberg Maverick 88 12-gauge shotgun. If found guilty, Astacio faced a sentence of up to seven years prison and the mandatory loss of her license to practice law.

"From the time she walked into that Henrietta store, she was never going to be able to purchase that gun, she didn't even fill out the paperwork," said Woods. He said the Henrietta store surveillance video clearly showed Astacio had an interest in purchasing a gun, although jurors weren't certain she necessarily intended to buy the specific Maverick 88 she was charged with attempting to buy. "She had no chance at all of every actually buying it."

The jury deliberated for nearly five hours over the course of two days. "We felt like she was guilty, but there was this technicality and she didn't meet all the criteria and for that reason we had to find her not guilty," said Woods. "We had to listen to what the law was, as directed by the judge."

Woods said he's seen some of the criticism being levied against the jury on social media. Many of commenters critical of the jury's decision are missing a major point, he said.

"I mean, none of us knew her or knew about her and we all reached the same conclusion at the end," he said. "How did she go to two Dick's and try to buy a shotgun and that not equal trying to buy a shotgun? We knew from the start that people weren't going to like this, we didn't like it, but it's what we had to do and at the end of the day you have to live with what you decide."

MCDERMOT@Gannett.com

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