It’s a helluva thing, a trial by jury. It was a radical notion 200 years ago, and it’s still a radical notion today.
I served on a jury once. Getting called for jury duty sucks, because most of the time you just sit in the jury lounge all day and then go home. But actually serving on a jury is a totally different thing. I think everyone should experience it at least once. In one sense, it’s just like you see on TV, except everything takes longer and you can’t go to the bathroom every 12 minutes. But it’s weird, if you’ve seen it on TV, because you realize that you already know the script. “Burden of proof,” “innocent until proven guilty,” “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” The judge lays it all out for you, from scratch, even though most people have seen the scene and heard the speech and read the words a hundred times.
Everything is slanted towards the defense. Big stuff, little stuff, process stuff, everything. We learned later (during sentencing) that the defendant in our case had several prior convictions, but the DA wasn’t allowed to bring them up during the trial. Witnesses were always being cut off in mid-sentence, but the defendant was given a wide berth to tell his version of events. We didn’t even know exactly what the charge meant until the defense lawyer made his closing argument. That, in particular, was incredibly frustrating. I made all sorts of notes like “is this important? don’t know, check later.” The judge said it was to force us to listen to everyone and everything as fairly as possible. It was frustrating on purpose, but it worked.
And I remember thinking at the time, “This thing. Right here, this thing. This is what we say America is about.” Everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and everybody gets their day in court. We suspected that Hans Reiser killed his wife. What did we give him? A trial. We suspected that Timothy McVeigh blew up a building and killed 168 people. What did we give him? A trial. (BTW, this is why people get so upset over our mishandling of terror suspects. What could possibly be more un-American than saying that some people don’t deserve a fair trial?)
The case I served on wasn’t anything you’ll ever hear about, or read about, or see on TV. Just some neighbors who had ongoing petty feuds for years and years, until one day one of them went too far and made a real death threat. You’d say he “crossed the line.” I think the actual charge was called “commencement of threats,” which basically means he crossed one of the invisible lines that holds society together.
Some people spend their whole life right on the edge of being able to function in a civilized society. I knew a guy like that, growing up outside Philadelphia. His name was Eric. He always seemed to be in trouble with the law. Never anything serious, and not your standard crimes like robbery or drugs or weapons. Just… not quite understanding the boundaries between himself and everyone else. He could make friends quickly, but then he lost them just as quickly. He never had a steady girlfriend. He couldn’t maintain any sort of long-term relationship. I think an ex-girlfriend got a restraining order against him one time. And he’d get arrested for stuff like “criminal trespass” and “commencement of threats.”
Society is about drawing lines that everyone acknowledges and respects. Some people see the lines and cross them anyway and hope they don’t get caught. Eric didn’t even see the lines. They didn’t make any sense to him, so when he crossed them, he didn’t understand why he got in trouble. And you just wanted to smack him and say, “Just stay out of trouble, Eric! Just leave people alone.” And he did, most of the time. But “most of the time” is not “all of the time.” And it’s a crude word, but I think he was a little bit crazy. Not really crazy, like Hannibal Lecter crazy. He just… couldn’t see the lines. You don’t have to be crazy all the time, to be crazy.
Anyway, our case came and went. The wheels of justice grind slowly, but there’s only so much you can say about neighbors yelling at each other. I think the whole trial only lasted a day and a half, from jury selection to sentencing. In the end, we deliberated and found the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The victim asked, and the judge agreed, and we the jurors were pleased to hear, that he should get a suspended sentence and a mental health assessment, with mandatory followup counseling. I’d guess he was offered deals and plea bargains, and I’d guess that everyone in his life begged him to take it. But he wanted his day in court, and he wanted a trial by a jury of his peers, and so that’s what we did. And he mounted a vigorous defense, and he was innocent right up until the moment we decided he was guilty.
I’m not going to get all puffed up about the glory of the system or the honor of performing my civic duty or whatever. The system is broken in a lot of ways, and there’s a reason they call it a duty — because it sounds a lot better in the abstract than it feels in the particular, slogging through downtown traffic and standing in line at the metal detectors and sitting quietly while people go on and on about their fucked up lives. But I also got a glimpse of a marvelous and precarious machine, built up and crusted over from two centuries of radical tradition, grinding ever so slowly forward. And it’s a helluva thing.
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© 2001–present Mark Pilgrim