Chosen by Default
Phillips, Maxine
IHAD BEEN called for jury duty before, and the results were always the same: everyone in the room where the lawyers questioned prospective jurors would laugh when I said that I worked for the...
...The crime described to us by the judge was common: young white woman alone on a side street...
...We filed in to be questioned—a group as varied as the population of New York City, minus many immigrants...
...Had the hooded sweatshirt, which was the red remembered by the victim, influenced us...
...I muttered my sympathy for the jurors in Los Angeles only to be corrected by a woman who said, "But this is the crime of the century...
...IHAD BEEN called for jury duty before, and the results were always the same: everyone in the room where the lawyers questioned prospective jurors would laugh when I said that I worked for the Democratic Socialists of America or I would raise my hand when asked whether anyone had a problem with New York State's mandatory-sentencing drug laws...
...In the end, we voted guilty...
...MAXINE PHILLIPS is executive editor of Dissent magazine and author of Crime and the Law, a textbook for low–reading-level teenagers...
...And he had a lot less to work with...
...The only inspiring aspect was seeing the mix of people called for jury duty...
...The young man was taken into custody, and she identified him on the spot...
...The defendant sat at the table, wearing a hooded sweatshirt similar to one that the victim said her assailant had worn that night...
...The victim had been mugged under a streetlamp, which gave her a good look at her assailant before he fled...
...Within minutes she had found two police officers who radioed a cruiser...
...Now there, I thought, was a juror's nightmare—a case that would keep you tied up for months...
...Even though now I worked for a magazine that didn't have the "S" word in its title, I thought Dissent might get the same reaction...
...What about Leopold and Loeb, the Scopes Monkey Trial, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys...
...And almost every case seemed to involve a police officer buying drugs from an alleged dealer...
...Simpson trial...
...Surely, I would huff to my friends, there were enough crimes being committed that the police could find better things to do than create them...
...The judge ruled the question irrelevant...
...The defense made much of the unreliability of eyewitnesses...
...Although I knew I could be fair, I couldn't imagine that the defense would let me sit on the jury...
...Downstairs, our defendant's lawyer was no Johnnie Cochran...
...I decided to keep my mouth shut...
...of my building almost twenty years before, but the situation was not...
...I'm not a lawyer, and Perry Mason had been off the air for some time, but I wondered how well this indigent defendant was being served...
...Truth to tell, I wasn't eager to serve...
...Being on a jury does "instill some of the habits of the judicial mind into every citizen...
...I agreed...
...Twice I have been assaulted in New York City...
...I would not have to wrestle with my conscience and I might still get some editing done later in the day...
...Either way, I was out of there...
...The prosecution scoffed at the idea that the woman could not have identified her assailant less than a half hour after the event, especially since he matched the description and was carrying on him an amount of money slightly larger than what had been taken from her...
...The defense attorney took us at our word that we could be fair...
...Others had no qualms, as they, like us, recounted their own stories of robbery and assault...
...young black man with knife demanding money...
...Earlier in the day, I had stuck my head into the television room, where many jurors sit before they are sent to a courtroom, and I had seen glimpses of the O.J...
...I thought...
...This should take about five minutes, I thought...
...What kind of a lawyer lets his client wear the same outfit to court in which he allegedly committed the crime...
...We now also knew that a conviction in this case would send him away for a long time...
...But when we were asked how many of us had been victims of crimes or were related to a crime victim, every member of the panel had a story, most worse than mine...
...I was on a criminal jury...
...The site was different from my own mugging in the vestibule 24 n DISSENT / Winter 2008 ”WE, THE JURY...
...I doubt whether any of us thought of Tocqueville's comment that he didn't know whether juries served the litigants well, but we were sure we had given the defendant a fairer shake than he got from his counsel...
...There were the dreary halls, the bored bailiffs, the sullen and scared prisoners of color (were the white criminals all in civil court...
...Several of us (perhaps the white liberals to whom the defense had been playing) worried about the severity of the sentence...
...Even though the evidence seemed overwhelming, the foreman (who had once been knifed during a mugging) insisted that we examine every angle...
...twice I've turned page after page of mug shots, and I've been grateful that I never had to trust my memory in a courtroom...
...We didn't know for what, but now we knew that previously he'd committed a fairly serious crime...
...DISSENT / Winter 2008 • 25...
...I'd love to be on that jury...
...Did knowing about his prior conviction have an effect...
...The young man appeared so genuinely upset to hear this intimate information proclaimed in a room of strangers that he could barely answer...
...No matter...
...In another bid for our sympathy, the defense asked about his mother, who was dying of AIDS...
...What I learned from those experiences is that it's the fear, not the face, that remains...
...His lawyer took the gamble of putting the defendant on the stand to try to explain how an unemployed person had eighty dollars on him, and in doing so, let slip the defendant's prior conviction as a juvenile tried as an adult...
...Each trip to the courthouse had depressed and infuriated me...
...But here, Tocqueville was right...
Vol. 55 • January 2008 • No. 1
