Since my last service four years earlier, the large jury room at 111 Centre Street in Manhattan has changed. The city has added softer, more comfortable chairs, improved the air conditioning, and made it easier to plug in a computer. Even the orientation movie on jury service has gotten better. Narrated by the late CBS newsman Ed Bradley, the film provides a brief history of juries. It is an impossible challenge for a film that runs for less than half an hour, but by emphasizing jury duty as a way of protecting all of us from losing our rights, the film avoids feeling like it’s trying to teach a high school civics lesson.
I was not optimistic about getting on a jury. As a college professor from the Upper West Side and thereby a presumptive, softhearted liberal, I am looked on with favor by defense attorneys and as the enemy by prosecutors. This time, too, I never made it onto a jury, but once again I left Centre Street admiring the way the jury system works in New York City.
The case I never got to sit on was, the presiding judge told us, going to be a short one. It involved a defendant who was accused of trying to sell drugs to an undercover detective. But neither the judge nor the attorneys involved treated the case as routine. They listened carefully as jurors told them what they did for a living, and when during the voir dire jurors said they thought they should not serve on this case, the judge asked them to approach the bench so he could question them in private.
When one potential juror asked about the Rockefeller drug laws, which carry with them particularly stiff sentencing guidelines, the judge did not try to defend the laws or treat the juror as a bleeding heart know-it-all. He explained that if she served on a jury, she could not think about what the penalty for the crime might be. Her sole task was to determine guilt or innocence based on the evidence presented. “Could she do that?” the judge gently asked. “Yes,” the juror, who was later excused from service, replied.
I do not know what the juror who asked the question about the Rockefeller laws was really thinking, but I was impressed by how my fellow jurors sized up the case during voir dire. The assistant district attorney told us that we were not going to be witnessing a Perry Mason-style trial. There would be no forensic evidence presented. There would be no secret tape recording of what the undercover policeman and the accused said to each other.
“In other words, they want us to take the cop’s word that the guy’s a drug dealer,” the man who had been sitting next to me said as we left the courtroom for lunch. Then he laughed, and everyone around us did, too. But it was not cynical laughter. Judged by the clothes people wore—Gap and Abercombie and Fitch, rather than Wal-Mart—it was a largely middle-class jury pool. My fellow jurors, more of them white than black or Hispanic, did not speak of the police with contempt, and judging by how many raised their hands when asked if they had ever been the victim of a crime, they were not naïve about street life in New York.
Nonetheless, based on what they had heard about the case, my fellow jurors had the feeling that something was fishy. Was this a bust that went bad? A desperate attempt to have an arrest to show for a night’s work? The assistant district attorney was in trouble if she did not have more to present than the evidence she hinted at. The defendant, who had the wasted look of a drug dealer from central casting, was not going to be judged by his appearance.
I never found out how the case ended. But it was impossible not to be impressed by the concern with justice that I witnessed. “See you in six years,” one of my fellow jurors said after we were excused on Monday afternoon and told that we would be credited with two years for every day we served. It was the cheerful goodbye of someone glad to be getting back to the normal routines of his life. But it was also a goodbye tinged with regret. The power of jury duty, of having a say in whether someone went to prison, had forced all of us to stand at moral attention. Few of us would be doing anything so important in the coming days.
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