Jury Duty 2003
I was called to Jury Duty last week on Wednesday. Since the late 1990s, New York City draws it’s jury pool from every list of residents it can get its hands on: driver registration, voter lists, Social Security, who knows what else. Automatic exemptions were removed at that time, so now, with more or less everyone serving (including, we’re told, a former US Attorney General), we’re only called to serve every four years or so. For almost everyone, there’s no getting out of jury duty; there’s only postponing it if it was particularly inconvenient. And, almost like clockwork, I served a bit more than four years ago.
I was at 100 Center Street, the Criminal Court building, like last time. I don’t believe the jury pool waiting room has changed, except now the signs have URLs at the bottom in addition to phone numbers. We still turn in our paper jury duty summons cards when we check in, and the cards are put into a rotating lottery bin to pull out the several dozen cards used for each trial’s pool. One difference: after watching a lot of Law & Order these past few years, I now know that “Part” is court system-speak for a particular court room in the building, presumably with its own set of judge’s chambers, baliff’s desk, deliberation room, and whatever else constitutes the suite of facilities used for trials in the city. There were a bit more than a dozen parts active in the building. I don’t know if judges share parts, or if they’re apportioned on a rotating basis, or if each part handles several trials simultaneously.
The clerk in charge of the jury waiting room is an old veteran, who fully understands that the vast majority of potential jurors waiting around would rather be elsewhere. He made our stay there easier with vaguely ironic jokes about the facilities and our service there. Whenever a trial needs juries to go through voir dire, the clerk puts all our cards into the rotating bin, spins it a few times and pulls out handfuls of cards. Names are read off, and the selected group is sent off with a bailiff, who has the cards in hand. It’s all very paper driven, with little cards flowing from one part of the system to another. There doesn’t seem to be a particular need to computerize this visible part of the process (the invisible parts have to do with bar codes on the cards, that records our terms of service), as these cards are exactly sufficient, and the bailiff sneaker net transporting cards from clerk to trial works fine, and constitutes a chain of custody. The rotating bin is also a symbol of randomization: names are selected through these physical means, not through an inscrutible computer screen. In this case, the symbols of random selection are probably more important than the mechanism, even though the mechanism may have more imperfections than electronic means. Note that the randomization isn’t for our, the jurors, benefit, so we can feel fairly selected vis-a-vis the guy sitting next to us in the waiting room: the randomization is to guarantee that the jury pool prior to voir dire is random. It’s for the benefit of the defendent.
Lucky me, I got called into a trial on the first lottery of the day. After we filed into the court room and took our seats in the specators benches, the judge, attorneys and defendent made their formal introductions. It was a cocaine possession trial. The defendent looked like a nice guy, saying, “Hi” to us with a shy wave. Never underestimate the power of nicely saying hello to strangers, especially ones who are going to judge your guilt.
Our juror cards went into a lottery bin kept by the part’s clerk, just like the larger one down the hall. Round and round for another random drawing. I was the tenth person called into the jury box for voir dire. The judge ran through the standard questions — do we know the ADA, the defendent, the defense attorney? do we know the area in question? are we related to anyone involved with the justice system? — and so on. After every few questions, a couple of people basically said that they couldn’t pass judgement on another person, or couldn’t put aside their biases to render a fair verdict. They were dismissed, and replacements were called in to take their place in the jury box. After the judge’s questions, the ADA and then the defense lawyer asked their questions.
Both the attorneys went out of the way to say that this was real life, not “Law & Order”. Lives actually do hang in the balance, and there won’t be any surprise twists or emotional confessions. It won’t be like TV.
Because this was a drug trial, the ADA’s primary questions were about how we felt about drugs, and reminded us that, no matter what we felt about decriminalization and the severity punishment, the law is still the law, and cocaine possession is against the law. Can we render a fair verdict, no matter what our political beliefs are? From her questioning, it appears that Manhattanites support pot legalization to varying degrees.
Because this was a drug bust, the defense attorney’s questions focused on whether or not we believed police officers could lie on the stand, and whether we would think negatively of anyone who didn’t take the stand in his own defense (which people do on TV, but not in real life). Apparently, the trial will revolve around the testimony of police officers, and the defendent isn’t testifying. We were reminded that her client is innocent until proven guilty, and it’s up to the prosecution to build a case beyond reasonable doubt, not for her to present an active defense. We the jurors generally agreed that cops were fallible humans, though a few jurors tended to think that it was necessary for the defendent to testify, “to hear his side of the story”. I’m not sure if this last part shows a need for more civics classes in this country, or an admirable desire to try to get the complete story. Or maybe both.
After voir dire, all the potential jurors, in the jury box or not, were asked to step outside into the hallway while the attorneys and judge conferred. After ten minutes, the bailiff came out and called all of back in. The judge read off three names — these would sit in the jury once the trial started — and let everyone else go to lunch. I wasn’t one of these three names.
Lunch near Chinatown for me means Vietnamese food, mainly because Vietnamese restaurants on the Upper West Side are relatively rare and relatively expensive. I went to the standard noodle shop across the street from the court building, got a bowl with random seafood in it as well as a Vietnamese-style coffee with condensed milk. I wanted to try out this $2 sandwich shop that was mentioned in the NY Times, but I didn’t have the address handy. It turned out to be on the next street over. Which was just as well, as the soup was good, and I needed the coffee. I was able to get to the sandwich shop the next day, and I picked up two shrip Vietnamese summer rolls with dipping sauce for about $2.75. It was yummy.
One other difference between four years ago and today is that bubble tea arrived on these shores, bringing with it Hong Kong-style snack shops in its wake. There’s one on the corner of Walker and Center that servers “healthy” mango-based snacks. I got a mango-coconut sago drink from there to go with my soup for lunch.
Heading back to the waiting room after lunch, I was stopped at the security checkpoint when the screener noticed that I had a digital camera in my bag. Cameras aren’t allowed, apparently, and mine was held until I left for the day. The screener in the morning hadn’t noticed it. Four years ago, the morning screener didn’t notice my Leatherman, which is considered a weapon, and was similarly held. There’s probably something to be said about the screeners in the morning needing more coffee/training.
When I picked up my camera in the evening, I noticed there were a bunch of phones at the security desk, too. They filtered out camera phones during screening. I’m not sure if they’re looking out for Sony VAIO laptops with the cameras mounted on the case, but I doubt it. I’m not sure what they’re going to do in the future, as cameras get smaller and ubiquitous. Presumably, they’ll have to punish the act of illicit courtroom photography, rather than try to intercept every picture taking device as they enter the building. I suppose the difference between the cameras and the weapons is that no one will likely die if a camera is snuck into the building, whereas that’s not the case with weapons. The other thing to note is that in the future, I should stay with GSM on my phone service, and keep a non-camera phone handy so I can just move the SIM chip if I need to take a phone somewhere where cameras are prohibited.
The first day ended uneventfully. The second began the same way, with the sitting around and not being called, reading and napping. I found the small jury room near the clerk’s office has nicer chairs and was warmer, especially in the sun. A few hours after lunch, the clerk called out around twenty names. I was one of them, and the clerk said we were to go to a different building. We followed him out the door, and down one floor, where he had us line up. I thought there might be some sort of bridge between buildings, but it didn’t look like there was anything like that there.
The clerk said we were all free to go, and that he had our service receipts with him. We were told to basically sneak out: don’t go back upstairs to say goodbye to your neighbor in the waiting room. I guess they had more jurors than they needed for the remainder of the week. I had already gone through a voir dire, so I had already sat in the jury box. The subterfuge was presumably so that he wouldn’t have to answer any “we can leave?” questions from the people still waiting upstairs. I’m not sure about the others, but we all rushed to the nearest elevator and got out, at least for the next four years.
It was still early, so I headed back to the office. But not before stopping for some mango pudding to go.