I revised my notions a few weeks later when I received a phone call from the Clerk of Court and a stern female voice—the voice of an angry schoolteacher—inquired why I shouldn’t be prosecuted for contempt of court. I mumbled something about having felt sick lately. I suppose the woman took pity on me (or maybe her primary role was that of gatekeeper), but she told me that she was sending a third summons, which I would heed, or else.
I did. A court day is usually a tedious affair. You wait; occasionally the bailiffs may explain the delay. If they choose not to, you still wait. You have lost the right to time on your own terms. Now you have to adjust your sense of time to the court’s. My first court day primarily consisted of watching the attorneys play a mysterious game of questioning those of us in the jury pool about our past experiences as victims and suspects with the criminal justice system.
In Savannah the attorneys have a limited number of “strikes” they use to narrow the jury pool. A “strike” excuses you from the case. The strikes fell like lightning bolts; no one knew when to expect them. Some very professional people, “model citizens,” fell by the wayside. I have no idea why I was chosen as an alternate juror. I suspect the prosecuting attorney simply didn’t care about the position. He barely looked up at me when the judge asked the lawyers to choose an alternate. He simply gestured flippantly. I think the defense attorney who picked me must have seen some evidence of a positive social ethic—or an exploitable social maladjustment?—in my answers and profile.
I have served on juries since then, and I have seen many cases on Court TV, but I have never since then witnessed a court case that initially appeared to be such a serious matter of jurisprudence and so quickly and ingloriously devolved. The defendant attended the jury selection and faced us. He was a handcuffed young black man, no older than twenty-five, who looked rough, cynical, and, in every surface respect, like a stereotype on display.
We were warned that the case involved sexual abuse of a minor. We were told the charges included drug use, robbery, and attempted rape. I can safely characterize the reaction inside the jury room to the last charge, “rape,” as a gigantic flinch. During the questioning session, several potential jurors expressed doubts and even vented hostility toward the expectation that they could serve with objectivity. I remember an older white gentleman rambling on and on, though the attorneys tried to stop him, in a reminiscence that evoked his children and grandchildren and how the very thought of them being sexually abused disgusted him beyond reason, much less objectivity. For someone else, the issue wasn’t the rape charge; he had several relatives in prison; he expressed animosity toward the whole legal process. Both these jury candidates received strikes.
We in the jury pool feared the harshness of the charges. We feared becoming entrapped in the lengthy and involved case. The irony was that if we had been chosen to serve, we would have returned to our regular jobs after two days. The trial was swift because the charges were meretricious. The harsher aspects of the case utterly lacked substance. It was obvious to me, and, as I later discovered, obvious to my fellow jurors, that the case was being “hyped” by an overzealous (mean-spirited? racist?) prosecutor.
The defendant had been smoking crack. He claimed, not very believably, that he was tricked into it under the belief that he was smoking a marijuana cigarette. He seemed to have experienced a hallucinatory “freak out,” as he put it. He entered the first house he passed by, screaming that he was being chased by violent pursuers. He trespassed into the home of a white family that included teenage kids. The defendant briefly grabbed the fifteen-year-old daughter, before passing out a few minutes later. That was the substance of the attempted rape charge. The robbery charge was apparently thrown in for good measure.
The bulk of court time was spent arguing the attempted rape charge. The prosecution called the fifteen-year-old daughter, who was rather sassy and at the same time so disengaged from the import of the trial that the judge had to admonish her to remove gum from her mouth before she testified. She claimed she could tell what the defendant wanted. He entered the home screaming “women, women, women.” The defendant took the stand and said he was frightened and that he was sorry he grabbed the girl. He declared that he entered the home screaming “They’re coming! They’re coming!” The DA delivered a heated closing argument, calling on the jury to “send a message” by convicting the defendant on all charges. The defense pointed out that the attempted rape-of-a-minor charge carried a mandatory sentence of twenty years.
As an alternate, I was not allowed to sit in on the deliberations. I stayed behind anyway, curious as to the outcome. Several court guards saw me on the benches and commented that my concern was unusual. Dismissed jurors normally do a forty-yard dash out of the courthouse. But I was honestly worried that my fellow jurors, mostly older, white, and middle class, would be harsh. I was concerned that they would fall for the DA’s rhetoric. I believed that I was about to see a major injustice committed in the halls of justice.
Perhaps I had seen To Kill a Mockingbird too many times. I was wrong. As it happened, the jurors returned in less than thirty minutes. They held the defendant guilty on three charges: cocaine use, illegal trespassing, and simple assault. Nothing else. Noting the defendant’s prior conviction for cocaine use, the judge promptly handed down a sentence of two years probation. The only juror I had bonded with, a twenty-something white male, noticed me, and when I told him I was worried that the deliberations would be contentious, he answered, “Man, the minute we went back there, we started laughing about this whole thing.”
I LAUGHED TOO. Laughter comes easier than complaint, particularly when the specific issue appears resolved. The jurors had performed their task; they had shown themselves to be “good citizens.” Still, what about the systemic issues? It is easy to tell ourselves, “All’s well that ends well.” It is easy to run away from the implications like jurors in a rush to resume their everyday lives. Perhaps the DA has done the defendant a favor by “scaring him straight.” Yet the charges were absurd, and rationalizing absurdity on any grounds is a slippery slope. It is not inconceivable that a jury could have convicted the defendant on the ridiculous charges as well as the legitimate ones. And what happens then? The case arouses a public furor, or doesn’t. Neither scenario is a laughing matter.
The jurors dashed for their cars and sped away. I had misjudged them. In retrospect, I wonder if I am misjudging them again when I wonder if they asked themselves, What did it say about society that the DA believed he could exploit the stereotype of black men as rapists, even with the flimsiest evidence? Was this particular DA a renegade zealot? Or was his attack-dog mentality commonplace? Is there a functional oversight process within the average DA’s office? The charges filed in early 2007 against the Jena Six in Louisiana offer a recent example of how far the abuse of prosecutorial prerogatives can go.
I do believe that a spirit of responsibility and social engagement infuses most jurors. And I believe this spirit usually prevails no matter how much they may have initially wanted to avoid jury duty. But I don’t feel easy saying this. What can interfere with justice are preconceptions by jurors that they have never had seriously challenged and are blind to themselves. These are preconceptions that prosecutors potentially exploit, and the jury room is no place to begin discussing. By then, it’s too late. There is no room left to walk safely between the poles of civic idealism and human bureaucracy in which the work of the court, like so much of the business of the world, gets done.
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