Jury Duty
I’m now officially one of those people who are too dumb to get off a jury. I’m sure, with the surety that comes from the paranoid belief that civic virtue is always punished, that all this started on the second Tuesday of November, when I voted in the midterm elections. Yes, I’m aware that New York State’s jury pools are supposed to be drawn from state tax receipts, driver’s licenses, public aid rolls as well as voter registration lists, but a few weeks after that, I received a “Jury Qualification Form”. Under the threat of legal action, you basically check off the boxes that state that you’re a US citizen and can speak and understand English fluently. A sense of pervasive doom filled me as I dropped that form in the mailbox. A few weeks after that, these dark premonitions were fulfilled as I got the summons to jury duty, first day being last Tuesday.
The New York County courthouse is actually a bitch to get to from the Upper West Side (as is, arguably, anything that’s vaguely east-ish). You actually have to walk a few blocks from any subway station to get there. From the City Hall IND stop, you have to schlepp through the construction at Federal Plaza. This is not a pleasant thing to do at 8:15 AM in January. The courthouse itself is actually this large, vaguely ominous building, a sort of institutional Art Deco cast in dark gray. It would not look out of place in a Batman movie.
You have to pass through metal detectors to get in. I had a problem the first time through in the morning, when I kept on setting off the alarm even though I didn’t obviously have much metal on me. I turned out to be my second pair of glasses, tucked in a jacket pocket. The metal frame, combined with the glasses I was wearing and my belt buckle apparently pushed me over some threshold, from “harmless” to “possible terrorist”. The X-ray machine operator was a bit of a newbie: she was confused by this clipboard I had in my book bag, yet let me get in during the morning with my Leatherman utility tool, which probably just looks like an innocuous block of metal on the scanner. When I came through after lunch, the more experienced guard, who had actually guessed that I had a clipboard, stopped me and asked if I had a Leatherman or Gerber before I fished it out of my bag. They took it away and gave me a receipt.
The jury pool waiting room is a big one, decked out in swivel chairs that are less comfortable than they look. There are enough chairs for a few hundred people. For the people who are on their first day’s jury duty, they showed this informational video. I couldn’t help thinking, “Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me from such informational films as ‘The DMV and You’….” Instead, they had Ed Bradley from 60 Minutes doing the narration, as well as Diane Sawyer for a later clip. The video starts off with something out of the History Channel, showing, in contrast to our system of “a jury of one’s peers”, a trial by ordeal. Monty Python did this in Holy Grail. I think they should have shown that.
From a random shuffling of juror ballots, my name comes up (with forty or fifty others) to sit in on the first jury selection of the day. This turns out to be a murder second degree trial that the judge expects to take three weeks. The judge is sympathetic to the time concerns, and he’s pretty much willing to accept any argument on why someone can’t serve on this particular jury. I’m too paralyzed by indecision to get up on the large line to get out of the trial. Half the group that came down from the main room leaves in the first fifteen minutes, and the remaining people have their ballots put in some sort of metal box to be shaken up and drawn out in a jury questioning lottery. Of course, my name comes up again, and I sit in the jury box for this one.
This is a relatively modern, though small courtroom, with stark black and white paneling that’s peeling in some places. The chairs are like those found in spiffy college lecture halls: they fold up smoothly, and have a certain sleek look. The jury box has a few extra temporary chairs, which are presumably for the alternate jurors (once the jury is empaneled).
The jury questioning is very formal, a ritual give and take to ensure that the jury is fair and impartial to both the defendent and the prosecution. The judge basically explains why we’re here, and goes into a long, prepared discussion of reasonable doubt, innocence until proven guilty, and so on. It’s not a bad thing to hear, actually, since the implications don’t really sink in when you first learn all this in grade school, and are clouded after that by bad courtroom dramas on TV. It’s hammered in that verdicts are binary statements, and that you’re required to vote “not guilty” if the prosecution has not proven the case beyond a reasonable doubt. Johnnie Cochran’s “if the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit” takes on a different shade, acquires weight: this isn’t just a quick jingle, but a succinct restatement of how, if the prosecution fails to remove reasonable doubt, then acquittal isn’t merely a suggestion but a necessary conclusion. That’s how our system works.
The specific questions asked by the judge are of the form “Is there anything in your background that may bias your opinion? If so, can you put this aside and render an unbiased verdict.” It’s almost a ritual: “Yes, I have friends who are police officers. No, this doesn’t prejudice me.” Occassionally, one person will state that he can’t put his biases aside. The judge then went into a long statement on what being biased means for that particular variant of his question, and usually that person would say, yes, he can be unbiased in, say, listening to police testimony. Once, though, someone said he can’t be unbiased, in which case that person was released from the jury box and someone else was called in. The formal ritual of questioning — where all the questions are asked once again — are repeated for that new potential juror. After the judge finishes, the lawyers have a go at their own set of formal questions and whatever rituals they do to ensure fairness.
We broke for lunch after the lawyers finished. I actually got back a bit late, and was a little panicked when I was stopped by the Leatherman in my bag — the judge said come back at 2:30 and it was now 2:40! And the building’s elevators are terrible! I soon found out judges and courts have their own sense of time, which typically runs at least 15 minutes slower than what it says on the clock. All the potential jurors were still sitting outside the courtroom, waiting for the baliff to say it’s OK to go in. When we were finally called in — only the ones that were questioned — it was a little anticlimatic: we sat in the audience area, and they read off a half-dozen names for those who had been choosen for the jury. My name wasn’t on the list. I was one of the ones bouncing back up to the big waiting room, relieved at not being trapped for the rest of the month on this trial.
The next day, coming in a bit later since I didn’t have to watch the video, and coming in without utility tool, I got picked for the jury pool for another trial. This one was a robbery — a taxi driver was held up — and was expected to last only two days. The judge was also much tougher with excuses for getting out of the trial, announcing from the start that, given the short trial, he wasn’t going to let people go that easily. A pregnant woman was one of the first people up to say she couldn’t serve, and was quickly sat back down in the pool. Interestingly, many of the people who went up after her to say why they couldn’t serve were let go. Perhaps bizarrely, one of the people from the earlier murder trial, who didn’t try to get out of it with the very lenient judge, got up to make his case in this robbery trial, and was let go.
As luck would have it, my name came up again to sit in the jury box for questioning. The formal ritual was repeated, with this judge’s own variations. Interestingly, exactly one potential juror was kicked off in this phase, just like in the murder trial.
This was a big courtroom, the kind you’d see in the movies. High ceilings, lots of wood panelling, a large space in which the judge has to use a microphone. While sitting through the jury questioning, you start to take a note of some of the scruffiness underneath the judicial grandeur. Off in the corner are mismatched file cabinets, looking somewhat beat up. The 1940s style decor, while generally well maintained, is getting a little worn, with scuff marks everywhere from counting people sitting in those seats. There’s a wall-mounted fan in one corner, unplugged and apparently disused for decades, judging from the dust build-up.
During the lawyer’s questioning, the defense lawyer repeatedly annoyed the judge with long-winded speeches prefacing simple questions. He basically was painting the defense’s argument — that there was no robbery committed against the taxi driver, because he was trying to get back at his client for not paying the fare — in the jury questioning. This raised numerous objections from the prosecutor, and numorous “get on with it”s from the judge. The defense lawyer, by the way, looked a little like a hyperanimated Lurch from the Addams Family. The prosecutor looked like some bizarre cross between Dana Scully and Monica Lewinsky. I think it was the combination of hair and suits, as well as her slight zaftigness that gave that impression.
In any case, there was no lucky escape this time. I got picked for this jury. I suppose that, given a choice of trials, a two-day robbery trial is probably the best you can do.