Jury Duty
For only the second time in my life, I was called to jury duty the week of September 2nd–which also happened to be the first week of classes. I decided not to ask for a postponement, since the common wisdom suggested that I’d never be chosen anyway–and I doubt that there is a convenient time for jury duty if you’re employed full time and then some.
Well, I was chosen, and I did serve, taking me out of action for the busy first four days of the semester, an absence for which I’m still playing catch-up. It was a life-changing experience.
Before, during, and since my jury duty, I can’t count the people (most with multiple degrees) who’ve asked why I didn’t manage to extricate myself from serving. “Didn’t you tell them you hate (guns) (poor people) (men) (ethnic minorities) (drop-outs) (etc)?” they asked. And while irony is a way of life for me, I found myself suddenly and uncharacteristically earnest. I didn’t try to get out of jury duty because I actually wanted to believe in our justice system. And after serving, I do.
This was a criminal case involving an 18 year-old African American man charged with something serious enough to put him away for 20-25 years if convicted (the sentencing guidelines were unknown to the jury until after the trial–we weren’t supposed to think about the punishment, just guilt beyond a reasonable doubt). It was full of sadness and ambiguity, and opened up a world that I suspect I and my fellow jurors knew little about–a world where 10 year-old children are routinely sent out to the corner store in downtown Albany late on a school night, where families live not in squalid conditions, but in poverty severe enough to mean no sheets on beds, no shades on light bulbs. One of the crime scene photos showed one such room, with a scrap of paper taped to the wall declaring it “T’s Room”–and I thought of the little wooden plaque I’d had hand-painted for my own daughter’s room many years ago, with her name surrounded by flowers and fairies, and of all the trappings of childhood our family took for granted. How my daughter’s expectations for life and the world around her must have differed from the inhabitant of that room.
But those thoughts could not, of course, affect the verdict in this trial. What could affect it–the evidence presented–was another eye-opener. Note to Police Departments: Buy a camcorder or two, and videotape your interrogations. The accused signed a confession–but the police claimed that they’d taken it down word for word, and the minute the defendant opened his mouth to testify, every jury member knew that could not be the truth. Note two: Check your work. The official police record indicated that the interrogation ended before it began.
DNA evidence could have overcome the weaknesses in police work, but there was none. And even though, as jury deliberations began, the jury was almost equally divided between guilt and innocence, we kept returning to the definition of reasonable doubt and the evidence we had before us. There were, to be sure, a number of jurors who remained convinced that the defendant was guilty, but they acknowledged that their conviction was a gut feeling–and thus outside the bounds of our deliberation. After five difficult and emotional hours, we found the defendant not guilty.
So what was life-changing about this experience? I now have considerable confidence in the jury system, which I’d only been able to consider in theory (or on the screen) in the past. My jury consisted of equal numbers of men and women, from a wide array of educational and employment backgrounds, clearly (from non-deliberation chats) more conservative than liberal in our political leanings, ranging in age from early 20s to early 70s. And there was one glaring lack of diversity: we were all white. So I have to confess myself astonished at our ability to engage thoughtfully and without apparent bias as were were instructed by the judge, to remember that “not guilty” does not necessarily mean “innocent,” and to arrive at a verdict that made no one jury member particularly happy, but which was, I think, the right verdict.
Indeed, it was reassuring to read in the local paper a day or two after the trial that the defendant had twice turned down a plea bargain that would have put him in prison for five years; he had turned it down once soon after he was arrested and then again on day two of the trial (and the jury knew nothing of this). I like to think this meant he wasn’t just not guilty–that he was really innocent. But I know, too, that I’ll be looking for his name to appear in the paper again, around another crime–hoping, certainly, never to see it, but painfully aware of the life to which he returned after the seven months he’d spent in jail awaiting trial.
