IN A NORMAL WEEK as a writer and a teacher my big decisions are small: sushi or salad, jeans or a suit, adverb or no adverb. Faced with a big decision, I like to compromise. As a juror at the United States District Courthouse in Manhattan I was asked to make a decision that could either send an innocent man to prison or let a guilty predator back out on the streets. Both of these seemed like bad choices. There was no compromise. The man in question, a burly young guy, wearing a drab, long-sleeved T-shirt and baggy pants, sat in court in front of his pretty, intermittently weeping mother. I knew enough practical law to know that jurors should not be influenced by the presence of a mother in the courtroom; easier said than done. Justice may be blind, but how can a mother ignore the suffering of another mother?
For four days we twelve jurors—schoolteachers, performers, retirees, a photographer’s representative—considered and reconsidered an ugly fifteen-minute encounter on the corner of Seymour Avenue and Boston Road in the Bronx on a September Sunday. There, in front of a closed fish market at about 5:30 A.M, a veteran police officer, whose normal job was policing quality of life violations, pulled his unmarked maroon Crown Victoria to a stop across the street from what looked to him like a crack cocaine sale. The officer got out of the car, and his encounter with the defendant resulted in a handcuffed defendant bleeding on the ground. The officer would testify that he had fished a bag of crack out of the back of the defendant’s pants.
On the first day, we all filed into the jury box to hear the prosecutors and the defense lawyer make opening statements. The prosecutor said that the defendant had sold the drugs. The defense lawyer told us to focus on the credibility of the witnesses. The officer testified that he had looked through the tinted windows of his Crown Vic and seen the drug sale, but he was hard to believe. In a room of suits, he wore an unraveling sweater, and his story began to fray under pressure. Testimony by his sergeant, who arrived during the arrest, and more testimony from another policeman just made things worse. The officer said he was in uniform, but his sergeant said he wasn’t. The officer said he used a rubber glove provided by his fellow policeman to reach into the defendant’s pants. The policeman had no memory of the rubber glove. The officer said one police van responded; many cars had responded. In the end, the officer had abruptly turned the case over to another cop; that cop hadn’t seen the arrest, but he wanted the overtime.
Were all these contradictions evidence that the police were telling the unrehearsed truth? Or did they show that someone was embellishing the story or omitting important facts? The officer was asked to go over his testimony again and again, and late-afternoon drowsiness settled on the courtroom. The judge alertly fielded objections, but some of us began to fade. To keep myself awake I began comparing the participants to animals: the tall prosecutor was a graceful crane with folded wings, the judge a wise lion, and the defense lawyer a gray fox. The defendant and the officer were both bulldogs.
Back in the jury room, our first vote was eleven to one in favor of acquittal. But as the memory of the officer’s testimony faded, his credibility seemed to increase. The phrase innocent until proven guilty became our mantra. We read over the judge’s Instructions of Law to the Jury again and again. Often, a juror just put a weary head down on the table in despair. We reread the officer’s entire transcript. We bullied and coaxed. We split into discussion groups. The minutes between 5:30 and 5:45 on the morning of September 22 obsessed us. Where had the woman buyer gone? What was the officer’s previous record? What was the defendant’s previous record?
Some of the jurors had served many times, but those of us who were new to the process were stunned by its seriousness. Many complained of sleeplessness. At night when I went to bed, my mind reeled with visions of innocence, visions of evil, recapitulations of the events in front of the fish market in the dawn light. Innocent or guilty? “Either way,” said one of my fellow jurors, “I feel as if I’ll never be able to sleep again.” Making a big decision on the basis of so little information was frustrating. We took the frustration out on each other. Our last vote, three days later was almost perfectly reversed—ten to two against acquittal. I was one of the jurors whose doubts about the police testimony made it impossible for me to vote to convict. The judge declared a mistrial. Later I heard that the defendant was retried and that he did ultimately go to jail.
So Tocqueville was right. I got a lesson in practical law—a harder lesson than I had bargained for. I learned that the majority does not rule in criminal juries—verdicts must be unanimous. I learned that reasonable doubt comes naturally to me. I learned that having to decide a man’s fate can ruin your sleep. I changed, too. Jury duty is too important to leave to those not smart enough to avoid it. The next time I am summoned I will go without hesitation.
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