Clothed in innocence: My Experience as a Juror

This is a summons to appear for jury duty. I emerged from the rapid train at Tower City clutching the summons and supposing that I was heading to County Court, where I’d done four days of jury duty before (no trial, just waiting around until being dismissed, my duty served, on a Thursday afternoon). I hadn’t bothered to read the summons very closely (that’s how it is with pieces of mail you wish you could ignore) and it was only as I was hoofing it to the courthouse that I bothered to look at the address. My summons was for the federal Justice Center at 801 E. Superior Avenue.

I had been called for jury duty four or five times before in my life—a handful of times in the District of Columbia and suburban Maryland, where I lived as a younger adult, and once here in Cuyahoga County. I had never been seated on a jury to hear a case, so this time I had an uncannily strong presentiment that my number was up.

It was. A hundred or so of us were seated in the waiting room when our names were called off in numbered order (it would be interesting to know how that order was determined; I assume it was random). My number was 24. Thirty or forty of us were led up to the courtroom where the presiding Judge and attorneys for defense and prosecution were waiting for us. The first 12 potential jurors took seats in the jury box, the rest of us in the gallery seats. Then the defendant in the case was introduced and the charges were read aloud, providing the barest outline of what the case would be about.

Then began a process known as voir dire (it’s French, but derives from the Latin verum decire, meaning to “say what is true”) whereby the potential jurors are queried as to whether there is any reason to believe they could not impartially render a verdict in the trial. The Judge asked each of the 12 potential jurors in the jury box to say a bit about themselves. A few were dismissed. The lawyers for defense and prosecution were also allowed a certain number of “peremptory challenges,” whereby they could dismiss a potential juror without stating a cause (an exercise I interpret as an effort to allow each side some control over the randomness of random selection).

Throughout this winnowing process, dismissed jurors were replaced one-by-one by with those of us sitting in the gallery seats, until a final jury of 12 was seated in the jury box. But the court would also need four “alternates” to sit with the jury, hear the entire case, and potentially participate in deliberating a verdict if one of the original 12 should drop out. As the 24^th in line after something like 10 dismissals (you do the math) my number was indeed up, and before I knew it, there I was, seated as an alternate on a jury hearing a criminal case in U.S. Federal Court.

As an alternate—in fact, I was the third alternate—I presume that the probability of my winding up in deliberations was always very slim. (In fact, I have no idea how often alternates wind up participating in a decision). This being the case you might think I was in a sweet position to sit back and watch an interesting drama without having the responsibility of deciding the matter.

Undoubtedly, a different kind of personality might have looked at it that way. I could not. For one thing, I found the facts of the case immensely engrossing. I also found them unsettling. In any case, the judge instructed us alternates to pay attention to the case as if we might be making the deliberation, so that’s what I did. For the next ten days, the myriad facts of the case overtook my mind, waking and sleeping, like an occupying army, sealing the borders and subjugating my thought life to a kind of Marshall Law, imposed by The Case. I woke at odd hours of the night and early morning with the details of the case tumbling over and over and over in my mind like so much laundry, yet to come clean.

The trial included moments of very high drama. And there appeared on the witness stand a handful of extremely vivid characters who might have walked off of a movie set. (In this particular case, it would have to be film noir.)

I would not promise that every juror’s experience will include such color and shade. In many other respects the proceedings were deflating to those of us used to watching television courtroom dramas where the narrative is tightly compressed for dramatic effect and experienced actors make eloquent pronouncements written by highly paid script writers. There were periods of exquisite tedium. And a fair amount of lawyerly maneuvering (all those objections, overruled and sustained!) are bound to be opaque to jurors who are, as I am, jurisprudentially naïve.

About that naiveté. One of my strongest feelings throughout the trial was that of my utter inadequacy to be deciding the matter at hand (even to be in a position to potentially decide)—a matter which was, after all, no small thing, pitting the rule of law versus the fate of a fellow human being in the docket. Speaking personally, I experienced it as an awesome and terrible thing to be sitting in judgment on another individual. I suspect my feelings are not uncommon. But in fact justice does not require that you bring any kind of “expertise” to jury duty, only that you bring the simple wisdom, accessible to most of us, to see a fact for a fact, and to see evidence or the lack of it for what it is, and what it is not. And your fellow-feeling for the fellow in the docket is precisely what is implied in the phrase “a jury of one’s peers.” (Somewhere in the halls of the Justice Center there is a photograph on a poster designed to encourage jury duty that always brought a smile to my face when I looked at it. It depicts a cat, with a stricken look on its face, surrounded by a 12-member jury of dogs.)

Some of the language of law is intimidating and might compel a normal individual to flee in the opposite direction as from a swarm of bees. But there are some phrases and images of startling beauty. One of those is the phrase, “clothed in innocence.” “There sits the defendant clothed in innocence,” the judge told us, pointing to the defendant at the beginning of the trial.
I had never heard the phrase, although I gather it is a standard injunction. As the trial wore on, perhaps it stood out for me amid the dispiriting facts of the case, as a bit of graceful human wisdom.

It’s a compelling image—clothed in innocence. It suggests, first, the totality of the innocence in which the defendant is presumed to stand before the court of law—innocent, as it were, from head to foot. But it also suggests something else—for if innocence, for the purposes of the trial, is only a garment, then it can be torn asunder, and the defendant can be exposed, disrobed, made naked before his or her peers. Which just about precisely conveys the vulnerability of a defendant at trial.

Of course, a “presumption” of innocence is not a certainty, and all of us are invested in seeing that guilty parties are exposed at trial and given a just punishment for their crimes (otherwise as a society we are lost). This tension—between the rule of law, which no one is above, and the rights of the defendant—is the tension that animates a jury member’s responsibility in rendering a decision, and it is the foundation for the drama that unfolds in a trial.

But the “real truth” about what transpires in human affairs (always untidy and frequently tragic) can never be known in any ultimate sense by those on the outside; that truth—about who did what to whom and when in any particular human drama—can only be known by the protagonists themselves. Barring a dramatic confession in the courtroom, the two contending sides in a trial will stick to their conflicting versions of the “truth” down to the wire.

This side of death we do, as the apostle said, see through a glass darkly. The 18^th century rationalists who conceived a jury system and our constitutional arrangements accepted our compromised state with regard to “ultimate truth,” and created instead a system admirably arranged—rationally arranged—to arrive at workable truths, livable solutions (would that our politicians would keep this in mind—workable truths, livable solutions). What the jury can do is arrive at such truth as can be discerned by the light of the rules of evidence and the law as it applies to that evidence (which is explained by the judge before the jury goes into deliberation).

The trial had lasted five-and-a-half days. The jury of 12 deliberated for approximately 15 hours over two-and-a-half days. (During the period of deliberation, we alternates were still required to be present in the justice center, and whiled away the time chatting, reading, and fidgeting with our smart phones. A bit anticlimactic, to be sure. We did not discuss the case amongst ourselves—the judge admonished all jurors during the trial not to discuss the case during breaks—and during the deliberative period when we all assembled in the morning, the alternates were kept segregated from the deliberative jury.)

Temperamentally, I am inclined to believe the last reasonable thing a reasonably sincere sounding person tells me. I don’t know whether that makes me a good juror, or the worst kind of juror imaginable.  What I can say is that nothing about the case I heard seemed “open and shut” for either side. Defense and prosecution both told a narrative that was compelling and, on different points and in varying degrees, convincing. But on the night before what turned out to be the day when the jury of 12 would conclude its deliberations, I arrived (more or less easily) at a conclusion—the same conclusion, in fact, that the jury of 12 would deliver the next day.

I and my fellow alternate jurors would not know that verdict any sooner than anyone else in the courtroom, until the judge himself was handed the jury verdict and read it aloud. All 16 of us filed into the courtroom together. The entire court rose as we walked in. I dared not to look at the defendant or at the prosecutors or at the assembled men and women in the gallery, packed on both sides. The jury foreman handed an envelope to the bailiff, who handed it to the judge.
“Not guilty,” the judge said. There was no dramatic response anywhere, at least not while we jurors were still in the court. (Before leaving, I stole a look at the prosecutors table; the lawyers appeared to be models of composure and rectitude.) In the jury waiting room where we retreated after the verdict the sense of relief was palpable, as if all twelve jurors had been holding their breath for ten days and were finally allowed to breath. 

My experience as a juror was the education of a lifetime, in many respects. It was also chastening; for the other thing I will take away from the experience was how palpably fateful, how vividly earnest were the proceedings. Our other civic duties—voting and paying taxes—are most certainly consequential, but they are filtered through a prism of mass effects. In a jury, the voice of a single juror can decide a case, and the guilt or innocence of the defendant has real world implications that ripple out beyond the immediate. Very little I ever do (outside of the raising of my child) will ever be as consequential, as pregnant with implications in the “real world,” as the decision rendered by my colleagues on the jury. It is remarkable thing—sobering and affecting—when 12 men and women bring nothing more elaborate than their humanity to bear on the judgment of a defendant who remains, until disrobed by a force of facts sufficient to overcome reasonable doubt, clothed in the raiment of innocence.

(Image: DNYC59/istock.com)