Truth to tell, I wasn’t eager to serve. Each trip to the courthouse had depressed and infuriated me. There were the dreary halls, the bored bailiffs, the sullen and scared prisoners of color (were the white criminals all in civil court?). And almost every case seemed to involve a police officer buying drugs from an alleged dealer. Surely, I would huff to my friends, there were enough crimes being committed that the police could find better things to do than create them. The only inspiring aspect was seeing the mix of people called for jury duty.
We filed in to be questioned—a group as varied as the population of New York City, minus many immigrants. The crime described to us by the judge was common: young white woman alone on a side street; young black man with knife demanding money. The site was different from my own mugging in the vestibule of my building almost twenty years before, but the situation was not. Although I knew I could be fair, I couldn’t imagine that the defense would let me sit on the jury. But when we were asked how many of us had been victims of crimes or were related to a crime victim, every member of the panel had a story, most worse than mine. No matter. The defense attorney took us at our word that we could be fair. I was on a criminal jury.
The defendant sat at the table, wearing a hooded sweatshirt similar to one that the victim said her assailant had worn that night. What kind of a lawyer lets his client wear the same outfit to court in which he allegedly committed the crime? I thought. I’m not a lawyer, and Perry Mason had been off the air for some time, but I wondered how well this indigent defendant was being served.
Earlier in the day, I had stuck my head into the television room, where many jurors sit before they are sent to a courtroom, and I had seen glimpses of the O.J. Simpson trial. Now there, I thought, was a juror’s nightmare—a case that would keep you tied up for months. I muttered my sympathy for the jurors in Los Angeles only to be corrected by a woman who said, “But this is the crime of the century. I’d love to be on that jury.” What about Leopold and Loeb, the Scopes Monkey Trial, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys? I decided to keep my mouth shut.
Downstairs, our defendant’s lawyer was no Johnnie Cochran. And he had a lot less to work with. The victim had been mugged under a streetlamp, which gave her a good look at her assailant before he fled. Within minutes she had found two police officers who radioed a cruiser. The young man was taken into custody, and she identified him on the spot.
The defense made much of the unreliability of eyewitnesses. I agreed. Twice I have been assaulted in New York City; twice I’ve turned page after page of mug shots, and I’ve been grateful that I never had to trust my memory in a courtroom. What I learned from those experiences is that it’s the fear, not the face, that remains.
The prosecution scoffed at the idea that the woman could not have identified her assailant less than a half hour after the event, especially since he matched the description and was carrying on him an amount of money slightly larger than what had been taken from her.
His lawyer took the gamble of putting the defendant on the stand to try to explain how an unemployed person had eighty dollars on him, and in doing so, let slip the defendant’s prior conviction as a juvenile tried as an adult. We didn’t know for what, but now we knew that previously he’d committed a fairly serious crime. We now also knew that a conviction in this case would send him away for a long time.
In another bid for our sympathy, the defense asked about his mother, who was dying of AIDS. The young man appeared so genuinely upset to hear this intimate information proclaimed in a room of strangers that he could barely answer. The judge ruled the question irrelevant.
This should take about five minutes, I thought. I would not have to wrestle with my conscience and I might still get some editing done later in the day. But here, Tocqueville was right. Being on a jury does “instill some of the habits of the judicial mind into every citizen.” Even though the evidence seemed overwhelming, the foreman (who had once been knifed during a mugging) insisted that we examine every angle. Had the hooded sweatshirt, which was the red remembered by the victim, influenced us? Did knowing about his prior conviction have an effect? Several of us (perhaps the white liberals to whom the defense had been playing) worried about the severity of the sentence. Others had no qualms, as they, like us, recounted their own stories of robbery and assault.
In the end, we voted guilty. I doubt whether any of us thought of Tocqueville’s comment that he didn’t know whether juries served the litigants well, but we were sure we had given the defendant a fairer shake than he got from his counsel.
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