Luck of the Draw
Barkan, Joanne
IT WAS A drug deal gone bad. Two white men from the suburbs drive to Harlem one night to buy cocaine. There's a hassle, a shot, and one of them ends up dead. The judge in the state criminal...
...Jury duty is, indeed, a free school in the nation's system of law and its application by and for citizens...
...I trailed off with, "You know . . . Amadou Diallo...
...The judge immediately asked, "How would you like to get to know some police officers here...
...A few more rounds, and he's finished...
...Oh, never mind," he said...
...there were four armed cops in the courtroom), but those on the street often used excessive force...
...Afterward I berated myself for not speaking up from the jury box...
...I wasn't one of them...
...An arrest threat...
...A pause...
...The jury system, Tocqueville wrote, "should be regarded as a free school which is always open and in which each juror learns his rights, comes into daily contact with the best-educated and most-enlightened members of the upper classes, and is given practical lessons in the law...
...Like the professionals in every field, they include talented practitioners, mediocrities, and the occasional bad apple...
...he calls out...
...No," we sing in unison...
...Only five jurors had been selected...
...Several years after the drug-related murder case, I was part of the voir dire for a case involving a drug bust by an undercover narcotics officer...
...I hesitated...
...After all the judge who ran the voir dire was a jackass, not a thug enabling a repressive regime...
...JOANNE BARKAN is a writer who hopes to serve on a jury in New York City someday...
...I look at the defendant and wonder if he can get a new lawyer...
...In any case, I sat there outraged while calculating how I could make sure I stayed off that particular jury...
...Worst of all, he didn't offer the prospective jurors a chance to speak to him in private about experiences they didn't want to 20 n DISSENT / Winter 2008 "WE, THE JURY...
...I was referring to the highly publicized case of the unarmed Guinean immigrant killed in 1999 at the doorway of his Bronx apartment house...
...Even a billionaire with a phalanx of silksuited lawyers can find herself in front of a secondrate judge...
...The defendant obviously has the most at stake, but everyone involved in the trial feels the effects of the judge's caliber...
...I didn't notice that he had skipped this step, which every other judge had included, until the first of three women had to answer questions about being raped...
...The silent screamer inside my head began: She doesn't have to answer those questions here...
...When the prosecutor asked how I felt about the police, I replied that I knew there were officers who performed their jobs very well (I was searching for words...
...The lawyers were doing their jobs well, but after a minute and a half, I knew the presiding judge was a complete jerk...
...they have the most direct relationship with the jurors, a relationship of authority...
...They include the same mix of competencies, but luck of the draw determines whether or not you get one who is skillful and fair...
...Judges set the tone and pace of the proceedings...
...But the court professionals are not all Tocqueville's best and brightest...
...Tocqueville wouldn't have approved of shirking...
...And yet he turned what should have been an orderly democratic procedure into a scene of intimidation and disrespect...
...He snapped at the lawyers for no good reason, ridiculed them with sarcastic jokes, rolled his eyes when no one laughed, belittled us with wisecracks when we were answering questions, and disparaged the procedure...
...Had I overreacted...
...Actually I wasn't certain about that...
...The judge in the state criminal court in Lower Manhattan explains that much, and the voir dire (jury selection) begins with about forty of us sitting in the jury box...
...When did it happen...
...She can speak to the judge in private if she wants...
...But the defense lawyer wants our answers in unison...
...We're puzzled about how to proceed, but by the next question, we've got the hang of it...
...Did you know the perpetrator...
...Was he apprehended...
...The defense was clearly going to argue entrapment, so the lawyers tried to get a sense of how the prospective jurors felt about the police, drug users, and drug pushers...
...When judges say, "This is my courtroom," they speak the truth...
...One by one, we answer the judge's list of questions, then the prosecutor's questions...
...Inside or outside your home...
...You don't judge someone guilty because of the color of his skin, do you...
...they influence the course of the trial with rulings...
...The system operates differently with judges...
...You don't think someone is a murderer just because he sells drugs...
...discuss in the courtroom...
...In the United States—a democracy shaped by grotesque socioeconomic inequality—the poor often get stuck with the mediocrities as defense lawyers and can suffer dire consequences...
...How easily this can happen was, for me, the lesson of the day in the free school that Tocqueville rightly, for the most part, admired...
...My problem had an easy solution: all I had to do was tell the truth...
...I don't know how the judge would have reacted (probably not well) or if anyone would have wanted to approach him at that point...
...Four plainclothes officers mistook him for someone else and fired fortyone shots...
...I'll sign on to Tocqueville's statement as long as the phrase "best-educated and mostenlightened members of the upper classes" is replaced with "legal professionals whose level of competence varies wildly...
...DISSENT / Winter 2008 n 21...
...I don't either, in principle, but I cringed at the thought of being in a room for several days with that judge...
...At the end of the seven-hour day, the judge set the continuation of the voir dire for the following morning...
...Was the chance to speak in private the judge's prerogative or a court regulation...
...Recalling that day (and, to my surprise, feeling my heart race again and my mind spin), I realize that I had experienced it as a brush with the oppressive authority of the state: the tense silence as the women made the required revelations, the feeling of intimidation, the suppressed outrage, the callous judge administering the operation, the uniformed police with guns in their black leather holsters...
...Was that an invitation to join the jury...
Vol. 55 • January 2008 • No. 1
