I had to go for jury duty last week, though I didn’t get selected. It was a fruitful experience inasmuch as it actually forced me to think differently about our justice system. There were even more subtleties to it than I’d imagined.
First let me qualify the whole thing by saying that I DETEST what I term “DMV” experiences. Duck, Mitigate, and Vacate. DMV experiences are the infrequent situational trap encounters with those who you would never, ever, under any other circumstances, be trapped, like being in traffic school on a beautiful Saturday morning, waiting in line in the DMV listening to gum pop, getting stuck in a subway car for an hour or more and sweltering in the stench, or maybe a social welfare line if you’re that unlucky, or sometimes even growling in the Christmas wrapping line at some department store, or maybe being herded into an election-voting line, and oh yeah, the entirety of gradeschool and highschool. It’s places where there is a grab-bag cross section of every kind of person, which inevitably creates difficulties in communication and leads to an uncomfortable mess. I contend politics are always what they are because of this tragic soup.
You’re destined and doomed to try to explain a difficult concept, or urge patience in such a situation, to a person named Argok, who doesn’t have enough English under his belt yet to have a clue, or maybe Jesse, who grew up in the projects and is fucking PISSED at everyone and would bust a cap just to get out of there, to Meg, homemaker in an all-white suburb in an all-white Christian churchgoing anti-abortion stance, to Stan, heavy metal bass player and part-time speed freak, to Jorge, who does landscaping and struggles to feed his four children and wife in their one-room apartment, to Sarah, high-powered attorney cum laude grad Ivy League loaded Jewish princess, etc. etc. etc. There’s just NO WAY you’re going to have a good result when you have that many people trying to arrive at some kind of decision, or even get them to argue intelligently for an hour. So I spend my time ducking (questions, usually), mitigating (calming others usually), and getting the fuck out of there as fast as I can.
I never liked group projects as a kid, and they were just a small microcosm of what I usually find going down in a DMV situation:
1) You are all four or five assigned to work together. You look at each other and think OH CHRIST.
2) You sit and try to talk over what you are going to do. A bright person bullies the rest, the others dig their heels in. Sometimes you’re the bully, sometimes not. It’s immediately corralled into something you had not expected; or, everyone looks at everyone else, and they all go DUHHHHHHHHhhhh I don’t know, what do you want to do?.
3) You arrive at a lameass plan which is a whittled down approach to something that might have once been a good idea, but has been attacked and revamped until unrecognizeable;
4) You are expected to equally do the work, but really only one or two people are going to be doing the work and the others are just going to bring in some tacky materials to work with or maybe they answered a question or two, and everyone knows this and are fine with it. They will do their utmost NOT to do anything if someone else is already running with the ball. Imbalance is a certainty.
5) You hand in your work or give your presentation, or someone does, and you get graded with their grade, or they get graded with yours. It is nonrepresentational by default, and you, sadly, no longer care.
A jury constituency is pretty much like that.
Now throw into that kind of sludgepot a young man with a blue shirt and a shaved head, with an hispanic family of maybe 11 — Mother and aunts, sisters and brother, nephews and nieces (notably, no father anywhere) — in the benches outside the bar looking frightened for him. Their brother, their son, their best friend, their boyfriend, is now too many months over the top of 18, and is charged with gang activity and attempted murder with a handgun, as an adult. He could be put in prison for 10 years or more, something that would change his life for the worse most likely. He will be taken away from them, and brought closer to more harsh people. Make him even less socialized, even less normal, even less adjusted, and even more sure of life’s low shaky deal of a future.
As the two attorneys asked us a number of voire dire questions, they schooled the prospective jury members (unculled as yet) in how their answers were to be determined under the law. They put definitions on “evidence.” They put definitions on “witness.” They put definitions on “testimony.” They defined “reasonable doubt” versus the “beyond any possible doubt” that we all wish for in a decision. As jurors, one attorney said, we had to be consciously adhering to the justice system’s idea, not our own, of reasonable doubt, based on fact, evidence and not circumstantial or hearsay. Our gut feelings had to be put aside in favor of not only factual evidence, but admissable evidence, and evidence deemed “thrown out” was no longer admissable.
If we did not think we could vote fairly based on that standard, we had to tell him.
I looked at the Vietnamese girl in the middle and thought, does she understand this? I don’t know…. She looked like she swallowed a large marshmallow, her mouth stuck shut, her eyes wide. They had already let the Mandarin speaking girl go. Who ME? her delicate face seemed to say.
A white guy who was (surprise!) a Quaker got cut. He couldn’t say he could ever do that. I was proud of him. I didn’t know Quakers wore jeans, either….
The lawyers asked about gang activity and how many people had seen graffiti in their neighborhoods, how many people might have met gang members, had experiences of violent crime, how many people owned a handgun?
Here another white guy, whose face I recognized but couldn’t place, surprised us. Where had I seen him? On TV? Was he a sports team owner? A director? I know I’d seen him. He was as white and uppercrust as they come, that kind of blank, casual, my-khakis-are-actually-made-of-cashmere-from-Morrocco-and-I-picked-them-up-outside-the-hotel-in-Monaco kind of understated wealth. Couldn’t quite place the face.
“I own a 9-milimeter Luger.” he said.
GYAAAAh.! I thought so. I knew it when he had asked for a sidebar with the judge and didn’t want to announce his occupation.
“Why is he going up there?” A little Armenian lady asked me, at my shoulder on the bench. Her name was A-something-something-luz-czyksomething, which meant “sunrise” and was for her unpronounce-ability rewarded with the name “Lucy” in English.
“He’s probably very wealthy and doesn’t want anyone to know,” I whispered.
“Oh — you mean, like doctor?”
I wanted to kiss Lucy right then, she was so precious. That was as wealthy as you got in Armenia. Scope here is just not scope there, is just not the same scope as Mr. 9-milimeter Luger’s, either.
They went on selecting people, all of them supposedly normal, average, and therefore fair; some who looked very upset, since they would not be earning a normal days’ wage with this obligation. How fair would that make their deliberation, I wondered?. They culled Mr. Wealthy, Ms. Loud-mouth Attorney, Ms. Black College-educated but living in the rough side of town with her mama, with gang members in her past.
The judge, Barbara, a faultlessly dignified black woman, was so even-tempered, cordial. She had Whoopi Goldberg locks, but her face was smooth as a stone and expression almost unreadable. She had it DOWN.
The new jurors were all asked to state their summons number, their area of town, their occupation, whether married or single, children or not, etc.
A youngish dark-haired man responded, “2538, Silverlake, um… I’m a screenwriter, single, 1 cat….”
“Name of Cat?,” Honorable Barbara asked, without even a twitch. We tittered.
“Whiffles”, he said, suddenly not sure he had done the right thing.
She smiled faintly so as to put him back at ease.
Finally she had the bailiff swear them all in, and I was not one of them. I had such mixed feelings about it at that moment, looking at the boy in the hot seat.
Were you evil? I wondered. Who knows?
Were you under gang pressure? Likely. From inside OR outside.
Were you in a rage? Possibly.
Were you just plain stupid to be there at that time? Maybe.
Did you say Yes to a false leader because your Daddy was not there to lead you?
Or had you been one of those boys that had chance after chance in small ways through life, and you ignored them, and finally, just finally, you got your ass caught for going the wrong way one time too many? Could be.
But I would not be able to help you that much, nor possibly even the jury. Because now you are in the justice system’s web. And they are all in a DMV soup swimming like flies trying to get out. Some will do their work, and some will not, and you will get a C-grade service at best. Who knows if you deserve that?
Because here, this way, we will never know the whole truth. Only you, shaved headed boy, will know that.
But THEY will decide where you go, what you see, who you see and cannot see, what you eat, what you wear, when you get to wash, when you get to eat, when you get a phone call, when you get to work and when you don’t, and when you get medicine and when you don’t, and when you get mail and when you don’t, when you can look at your girlfriend’s face again through a glass and not touch it, when your mom can talk to you and see your damned shame, when you can see your little brother’s wearing your old sweater he’s so big now, and when you can or can’t get help if someone is squeezing the air out of your throat against some tile wall. Because they will have you now.
As we began filing out, the happy discards of the day, I thought:
Well, amigo, at least you’ve got Honorable Barbara. And you’ve got this mixed bag.
At least it’s not communist China.
As I was going out the door, though, I didn’t want to vacate.
I felt like maybe I was needed, and they were making a big mistake.
Put me back. I’ll do it.
Too late… Too late for us both, shaved headed boy.
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