See You in Six Years
Mills, Nicolaus
AT 8:45 IN THE morning on a hot August Thursday, I reported for jury duty in New York last summer. A week earlier Mayor Michael Bloomberg had made headlines by reporting for jury duty flanked by...
...It involved a defendant who was accused of trying to sell drugs to an undercover detective...
...fellow jurors sized up the case during voir dire...
...I went three days before I was sent home...
...The city has added softer, more comfortable chairs, improved the air conditioning, and made it easier to plug in a computer...
...It is an impossible challenge for a film that runs for less than half an hour, but by emphasizing jury duty as a way of protecting all of us from losing our rights, the film avoids feeling like it's trying to teach a high school civics lesson...
...When one potential juror asked about the Rockefeller drug laws, which carry with them particularly stiff sentencing guidelines, the judge did not try to defend the laws or treat the juror as a bleeding heart know-it-all...
...The power of jury duty, of having a say in whether someone went to prison, had forced all of us to stand at moral attention...
...There would be no forensic evidence presented...
...Nonetheless, based on what they had heard about the case, my fellow jurors had the feeling that something was fishy...
...Even the orientation movie on jury service has gotten better...
...I was not optimistic about getting on a jury...
...But it was also a goodbye tinged with regret...
...24 n DISSENT / Winter 2008...
...The defendant, who had the wasted look of a drug dealer from central casting, was not going to be judged by his appearance...
...The case I never got to sit on was, the presiding judge told us, going to be a short one...
...But neither the judge nor the attorneys involved treated the case as routine...
...The assistant district attorney told us that we were not going to be witnessing a Perry Masonstyle trial...
...Yes," the juror, who was later excused from service, replied...
...Since my last service four years earlier, the large jury room at 111 Centre Street in Manhattan has changed...
...Her sole task was to determine guilt or innocence based on the evidence presented...
...In other words, they want us to take the cop's word that the guy's a drug dealer," the man who had been sitting next to me said as we left the courtroom for lunch...
...Judged by the clothes people wore—Gap and Abercombie and Fitch, rather than Wal-Mart—it was a largely middle-class jury pool...
...The mayor served two days before being sent home...
...It was the cheerful goodbye of someone glad to be getting back to the normal routines of his life...
...the judge gently asked...
...They listened carefully as jurors told them what they did for a living, and when during the voir dire jurors said they thought they should not serve on this case, the judge asked them to approach the bench so he could question them in private...
...But it was not cynical laughter...
...A desperate attempt to have an arrest to show for a night's work...
...Narrated by the late CBS newsman Ed Bradley, the film provides a brief history of juries...
...Few of us would be doing anything so important in the coming days...
...My fellow jurors, more of them white than black or Hispanic, did not speak of the police with contempt, and judging by how many raised their hands when asked if they had ever been the victim of a crime, they were not naïve about street life in New York...
...There would be no secret tape recording of what the undercover policeman and the accused said to each other...
...See you in six years," one of my fellow jurors said after we were excused on Monday afternoon and told that we would be credited with two years for every day we served...
...I do not know what the juror who asked the question about the Rockefeller laws was really thinking, but I was impressed by how my DISSENT / Winter 2008 • 23 "WE, THE JURY...
...A week earlier Mayor Michael Bloomberg had made headlines by reporting for jury duty flanked by his aides...
...Then he laughed, and everyone around us did, too...
...As a college professor from the Upper West Side and thereby a presumptive, softhearted liberal, I am looked on with favor by defense attorneys and as the enemy by prosecutors...
...Was this a bust that went bad...
...Could she do that...
...This time, too, I never made it onto a jury, but once again I left Centre Street admiring the way the jury system works in New York City...
...The assistant district attorney was in trouble if she did not have more to present than the evidence she hinted at...
...But it was impossible not to be impressed by the concern with justice that I witnessed...
...NICOLAUS MILLS is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of the recently published Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower...
...I never found out how the case ended...
...He explained that if she served on a jury, she could not think about what the penalty for the crime might be...
Vol. 55 • January 2008 • No. 1
