Serving
on a jury, as I recently did, is one of those things that prods you into
thinking about larger issues of how our social, legal and governmental systems
work. Having been made a part of that process, whether you wanted to be or not,
you see it in a more real and tangible way.
By
dint of circumstance, one element of the jury experience hit me between the
eyes. Here in California your exposure is limited to a week. You call in the
night before to see if you have to go in the next day, and if you haven’t been
called for five days, you’re off the hook.
As
chance would have it, I was called in on Monday morning, which exposed me to
being seated on the jury for a six-day civil trial. Had I been called in any
other day of the week, I would have been exposed to a three-month murder trial.
Six days is a manageable inconvenience; three months is a business or
job-destroyer. I cheerfully did the six days.
Why Does It Take So Long?
When
the concept of trial by jury was first introduced a few centuries ago, they
didn’t have forensic specialists, psychiatric experts or most of the other
things that add greatly to the time of a trial. Practically every case was
heard in a few days, and just about anyone could afford to put the plow down
that long.
They
also didn’t spend a lot of time picking the jury. The idea was that it was
supposed to be 12 people who knew the defendant well enough to know whether he
was probably lying or not. Now the idea is to come up with people who know
nothing and have qualities that make them likely to be sympathetic to your
side.
During
our little trial we would step out into the courthouse foyer during recesses
and see dozens of prospective jurors for the three-month trial filling out a
questionnaire that looked to be about 10 double-sided pages long. I hate that
sort of thing. Most of the time the questions aren’t very good and force you to
give an oversimplified and un-nuanced answer. For a nuance guy like me, that’s
painful.
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
The
jury process itself is more than a bit humbling. A big part of that is that as
a juror you have to make a decision that means a great deal to the people
involved, but you have to do so based on incomplete knowledge derived from
incomplete evidence presented to you. When our jury was in deliberation, I
asked at one point, “Is it just me, or does anybody else feel like the evidence
presented to us doesn’t adequately explain what the heck happened here?” There
was a chorus of “yeas” and nodding heads.
We
moved forward and decided on the basis of the evidence we had that there wasn’t
enough of it to prove the case and ruled in favor of the defendant. In casting
my vote, I did so realizing that if I knew what God did, I might have voted the
other way.
Deliberations, in our case, brought out
the best in most people. Another humbling thing about jury service is the
realization that not everybody else looks at the evidence and sees it as you
do. Tolerance and courtesy nonetheless prevailed for the most part, and we were
eventually able to talk ourselves into agreement. For a fleeting moment I
wondered how things would be if Congress and state legislatures behaved like
juries, but that’s not what they’re elected to do. Nice fantasy, anyway.
Holiday re-run; originally
published July 29, 2011
