The Trial
The second day of jury selection for the robbery trial was on Thursday, but since I’d already been selected, I didn’t have to show up to the courthouse. This meant going back to work, which was a better thing, if only because there’s Internet access, only somewhat interrupted by meetings (I found out I may have to schlepp to Dallas sometime in February to do a Vulcan Mindmeld with some Sybase DBAs, regarding the relocation of some of our servers later this year). I was back at the courthouse on Friday, the first day of the trial.
I heard later that Thursday was somewhat hellish for the others still in that trial’s juror pool. They got to hear the exact same questions and speeches repeated again, and the same “I can’t put my biases away” exchanges between soon-to-be-dismissed jurors and the judge. Twice! And the people who were stuck late in the afternoon had to schlepp back to the courthouse early Friday morning, because the court officer in charge of validating their service had already gone home for the day by the time questioning was finished. You’re not off jury duty until that was done.
Before leaving the building on Wednesday, all of us selected jurors got yellow “Get In Court Free” cards. This allowed us to bypass the metal detector lines in the morning, which is terrific, since the line stretches out the door around 9:30 AM. Actually, it’s more than just bypassing the line — you also bypass the metal detector itself. Yes, being a juror means you can bring concealed weapons with you into the building. Later in the day, someone quipped that if we were going to be kept past 5PM again, he’s going to pull out the sawed-off shotgun: “We’re leaving” click-clack.
I saw the defense lawyer looking a little befuddled at the elevators that morning. We’re not actually supposed to acknowledge the presense of any of the other participants in the trial — not the lawyers, not the defendant — as even the slightest suggestion of a familiar “Hello” can be considered a breach of the legal rituals that conjure up the appearance of fairness.
When I got to the courtroom, I spent some time engaged in the main jury duty activity — waiting for the doors to open. This was Friday, the morning after the ice storm blew through leaving pools of slush in every depression in the sidewalk and street. People were late — a couple of the jurors, and the assistant defense lawyer didn’t show up until after lunch it turns out — and the jury wasn’t allowed into any part of the court room until everyone was there. The bailiff came out three times to call roll before the entire jury — plus alternates — had arrived.
By the way, I was reading Daniel Boorstin’s “The Discovers” at the time, and still am. It’s a big book about, well, the expansion of human knowledge throughout history. I just finished the part when Europeans discover the New World, and realize that Ptolemy’s maps weren’t quite right.
Interestingly, the courtroom across the hall from mine had a small table set up in front of it, manned by two bailiffs with handheld metal detectors. During the morning wait, I watch them screen the more than a dozen people who filed in as spectators. I have no idea what trial is going on in there.
The past week or so has turned out to be a weird one for high school associations. There was the subway pusher from two weeks ago. He apparently was a student from rival high school Bronx Science. Class of ’87, in fact. My friend from B.S. didn’t know him. Kept to himself, apparently. Anyway, while sitting in the hallway Friday morning, I was approached by another juror who looked vaguely familiar: “Do I know you?” The vague familiarity was mutual: this was Madeline Something-Or-Other from Stuyvesant, Class of ’87. The fascination with this would-you-believe reunion lasted all of thirty seconds, as we didn’t really know each other from high school. I haven’t schlepped home to Bayside to dig through the yearbook, though.
Speaking of high school, the men’s room on the 13th floor of the courthouse has this very decripit high school feel to it. It’s different from, say, the public restrooms in offices, which, while institutional, are generally kept clean, with minimal grime. They’re unlike the restrooms in McDonald’s, which generally are nasty with the volume of traffic. These courthouse restrooms are old and public. They’re showing their long service with worn-in dirt that’ll never be cleaned away and smudges of graffitti in the stalls. A good mopping would technically make it clean — and it basically was — but you’d never shake the subtle feeling of deep-set nastiness embedded in the tiles. I guess this bathroom has achieved the Zen paradox of clean-but-dirty.
After some time, the last juror showed up and roll call was complete. We were escorted through a side door to the Jury Room. This chamber wouldn’t look out of place in Henry Fonda’s movie. There was even one of those ancient fans up there, grime-covered and clearly unused for many years, presumably since the slightly less ancient air conditioner was installed. There was a large wooden conference table in the middle, a water cooler to one side, a coat rack in the back in between the doors to the dingy restrooms. The room had a great view, though: eastwards, over Chinatown and towards the Manhattan Bridge.
Pardon my fascination with the restroom, but the flush mechanism consisted of this small foot pedal near the floor, and not the usual hand lever you find in most public restrooms. I suppose there must have been a change in fashion over the decades, when the plumbing for the little floor pedal gave way to the little handle, which is giving way to the no-touch motion detector. Come to think of it, you’d think there’d be a positive benefit in, uh, less hand contact with the fixtures when using the pedal, though in cases of bad, uh, misses (at least in the men’s room), the pedals may be somewhat ickier.
I’m beginning to think that this e-mail is starting to reflect jury duty: long periods of boredom, interspersed with brief moments of acute hubbub. Well, patience, since the bailiff showed up soon after we’d finished refreshing ourselves to lead us to the jury box for the first witness’s testimony.
As said, this was a robbery trial. The story told about this incident is: on April 21, 1998, this livery cab driver picked up a group of five girls in upper Manhattan, and drove them to a different part of upper Manhattan. When he got to the destination, according to the prosecution, the girls pulled a gun on him and took all his money as well as an old driver’s license, so that they’ll know where to find him if he reports the incident. About ten minutes later, after the girls had run into a park, the driver comes across the girls again, this time being questioned by some cops about why they were running. He gets out of the car and accuses them of robbing him. The defense, representing one of this group of girls, contents that there was no robbery, that the girls had simply not paid the fare and the driver was getting back at them by conjuring up more serious charges, and that, after all, no gun, no money and no old driver’s license was found on the girls when they were arrested.
The driver himself is from Liberia, and while English is spoken as a first language there, it’s not in the neutral-to-America-ears dialect spoken by Peter Jennings. The questioning by the friendly prosecutor was actually somewhat painful, full of clairifications and rephrasings. But the essense of it was the ritual extraction of information, something that’s part of the public consciousness: who are you, what’s your background, what where you doing at 5:30PM on April 21, 1998? Did the girls wear anything identifiable? Can you identify them? Is one of them in the courtroom now? Can you point her out? When this happened, what happened next? At one point, a big board was brought out, with photos tacked on them, showing the area of the incident. After the witness and only the witness viewed these and identified them, they were ritually entered in as evidence, at which point the board was mounted for the jury to look at. It’s a very formal thing.
The defense cross examination also went almost like a minor movie script: What were the lighting conditions? Dim? As they ran away, did you see a gun? Are you sure? In a fit of overwrought theatrics, the defense lawyer, towards the end of the cross examination, presented his argument in the did-you-or-did-you-not formula: Did you or did you not accuse them of armed robbery when all they did was jump the fare?
The prosecutor’s redirect ignored that theory, and merely focused some points raised by the defense having to do with the lighting conditions, and a clarification on how long the group of girls were visible after they jumped out of the cab, whether he got a clear look. Through all the witness’s testimony, through cross examination and redirect, objections were raised here and there: leading the witness, can the question be rephrased, and so on.
I’m curious about the court reporter’s skills. He’s recording all this testimony on the little steno device: it makes no sound, and the keyboard is, well, weird. It’s played almost like a piano, with various keys pushed in combination to produce something, whether words, phrases or simply syllables I’m not sure about. In some sense, if he’s taking real time dictation, he can type faster than all of us put together.
One other point of ponder is the clothing worn by the defendant. In the jury selection for the murder trial, the defendant wore really colorful Tommy Hilfinger stuff. In the robbery trial, it was a clean, well pressed track suit, with some color that I only recall as not subtle. There’s some sorrow when you realize that this may be the best set of clothes available, and that this best set really doesn’t help their cause.
When this was all done, we broke for lunch. Chinatown’s proximity is a wonderful thing. I ate in a cheap Vietnamese place across the street from the courthouse. It turns out that this place was mentioned in the current “Let’s Do Lunch” issue of Time Out New York. I also had a pork bun from the standard bakery on Mott Street.
After getting back from lunch, the jury was kept in the jury room for a very long time. I was in the bathroom admiring the pedals when one of us was called out for an individual conference with the judge and the lawyers. Hmm.
For the next two hours, individual jurors were called out for similar meetings, some taking ten or twenty minutes, others coming back in a minute or two. The rest of us in the room tried to pass the time the way a dozen people who don’t know each other but have to amicably sit in a small room do: we’d compile lists of favorite movies, TV shows, ha-ha-wasn’t-it-funny-when references to the common culture. If Seinfeld were still around, there’d probably be a discussion of best episodes.
I was one of the ones that took only a minute or two. The problem was that someone had told the judge that there had been “deliberations” about the trial that morning, well before we were supposed to even whisper a word about what was going on. I didn’t recall “deliberations” in the sense of real discussion. At most, a first time juror, who perhaps was used to thinking out load, did make references to the case, but that never went very far.
At about 5PM, the judge declared a mistrial because he believed there had been deliberations, and that the jury’s fairness could not be guaranteed. The bailiff who had prematurely distributed next week’s jury passes collected them, and then escorted us out the courtroom: the south elevators should still be in service, and we’d be mailed the statement to show we had done jury duty, which we could show our employers if necessary. That was that.
Oh, and at the end of all this, I left my umbrella in some corner of the jury room. It was a nice umbrella, too.