The Alternate's Perspective
Wellington, Darryl Lorenzo
IAPPRECIATE TODAY that a jury summons is serious business, but I didn't two decades ago, when I was twenty-three years old and living in Savannah, Georgia. I received a jury summons and promptly...
...I believed that I was about to see a major injustice committed in the halls of justice...
...I simply didn't appreciate the difference between a jury summons and junk mail, such as letters from Ed McMahon claiming I had won a million dollars...
...Laughter comes easier than complaint, particularly when the specific issue appears resolved...
...The prosecution called the fifteen-year-old daughter, who was rather sassy and at the same time so disengaged from the import of the trial that the judge had to admonish her to remove gum from her mouth before she testified...
...He declared that he entered the home screaming "They're coming...
...The defense pointed out that the attempted rape-of-a-minor charge carried a mandatory sentence of twenty years...
...She claimed she could tell what the defendant wanted...
...The defendant had been smoking crack...
...Noting the defendant's prior conviction for cocaine use, the judge promptly handed down a sentence of two years probation...
...Was this particular DA a renegade zealot...
...I was concerned that they would fall for the DA's rhetoric...
...no one knew when to expect them...
...I can safely characterize the reaction inside the jury room to the last charge, "rape," as a gigantic flinch...
...They're coming...
...The case arouses a public furor, or doesn't...
...Perhaps I had seen To Kill a Mockingbird too many times...
...It is not inconceivable that a jury could have convicted the defendant on the ridiculous charges as well as the legitimate ones...
...A court day is usually a tedious affair...
...The defendant took the stand and said he was frightened and that he was sorry he grabbed the girl...
...Perhaps the DA has done the defendant a favor by "scaring him straight...
...I was wrong...
...It is easy to run away from the implications like jurors in a rush to resume their everyday lives...
...We feared becoming entrapped in the lengthy and involved case...
...The harsher aspects of the case utterly lacked substance...
...And what happens then...
...I suppose the woman took pity on me (or maybe her primary role was that of gatekeeper), but she told me that she was sending a third summons, which I would heed, or else...
...If they choose not to, you still wait...
...prosecutor...
...The strikes fell like lightning bolts...
...I am sure each summons spelled out the nature of my obligation and the penalties for absenteeism...
...The DA delivered a heated closing argument, calling on the jury to "send a message" by convicting the defendant on all charges...
...I do believe that a spirit of responsibility and social engagement infuses most jurors...
...What can interfere with justice are preconceptions by jurors that they have never had seriously challenged and are blind to themselves...
...His poetry is forthcoming in Drumvoices Review and ABZ magazine...
...Yet the charges were absurd, and rationalizing absurdity on any grounds is a slippery slope...
...The jurors dashed for their cars and sped away...
...I stayed behind anyway, curious as to the outcome...
...Some very professional people, "model citizens," fell by the wayside...
...DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON is a poet and critic living in Charleston, S.C...
...The defendant attended the jury selection and faced us...
...racist...
...He barely looked up at me when the judge asked the lawyers to choose an alternate...
...He simply gestured flippantly...
...Nothing else...
...occasionally the bailiffs may explain the delay...
...Neither scenario is a laughing matter...
...As an alternate, I was not allowed to sit in on the deliberations...
...You have lost the right to time on your own terms...
...You wait...
...For someone else, the issue wasn't the rape charge...
...The robbery charge was apparently thrown in for good measure...
...I wasn't rebellious...
...The only juror I had bonded with, a twenty-something white male, noticed me, and when I told him I was worried that the deliberations would be contentious, he answered, "Man, the minute we went back there, we started laughing about this whole thing...
...As it happened, the jurors returned in less than thirty minutes...
...He entered the home screaming "women, women, women...
...I mumbled something about having felt sick lately...
...they had shown themselves to be "good citizens...
...The bulk of court time was spent arguing the attempted rape charge...
...I had misjudged them...
...He trespassed into the home of a white family that included teenage kids...
...Dismissed jurors normally do a forty-yard dash out of the courthouse...
...Now you have to adjust your sense of time to the court's...
...The jurors had performed their task...
...That was the substance of the attempted rape charge...
...I have served on juries since then, and I have seen many cases on Court TV, but I have never since then witnessed a court case that initially appeared to be such a serious matter of jurisprudence and so quickly and ingloriously devolved...
...It was obvious to me, and, as I later discovered, obvious to my fellow jurors, that the case was being "hyped" by an overzealous (mean-spirited...
...Is there a functional oversight process within the average DA's office...
...Still, what about the systemic issues...
...There is no room left to walk safely between the poles of civic idealism and human bureaucracy in which the work of the court, like so much of the business of the world, gets done...
...Or was his attack-dog mentality commonplace...
...I revised my notions a few weeks later when I received a phone call from the Clerk of Court and a stern female voice—the voice of an angry schoolteacher—inquired why I shouldn't be prosecuted for contempt of court...
...These are preconceptions that prosecutors potentially exploit, and the jury room is no place to begin discussing...
...32 n DISSENT / Winter 2008...
...The trial was swift because the charges were meretricious...
...I received a jury summons and promptly ignored it...
...I remember an older white gentleman rambling on and on, though the attorneys tried to stop him, in a reminiscence that evoked his children and grandchildren and how the very thought of them being sexually abused disgusted him beyond reason, much less objectivity...
...And I believe this spirit usually prevails no matter how much they may have initially wanted to avoid jury duty...
...doubts and even vented hostility toward the expectation that they could serve with objectivity...
...But I don't feel easy saying this...
...Several court guards saw me on the benches and commented that my concern was unusual...
...I suspect the prosecuting attorney simply didn't care about the position...
...During the questioning session, several potential jurors expressed 30 n DISSENT / Winter 2008 "WE, THE JURY...
...In retrospect, I wonder if I am misjudging them again when I wonder if they asked themselves, What did it say about society that the DA believed he could exploit the stereotype of black men as rapists, even with the flimsiest evidence...
...I have no idea why I was chosen as an alternate juror...
...But I did not think twice about dismissing them...
...Both these jury candidates received strikes...
...We were told the charges included drug use, robbery, and attempted rape...
...He claimed, not very believably, that he was tricked into it under the belief that he was smoking a marijuana cigarette...
...But I was honestly worried that my fellow jurors, mostly older, white, and middle class, would be harsh...
...DISSENT / Winter 2008 n 3 1 "WE, THE JURY...
...We in the jury pool feared the harshness of the charges...
...He entered the first house he passed by, screaming that he was being chased by violent pursuers...
...The charges filed in early 2007 against the Jena Six in Louisiana offer a recent example of how far the abuse of prosecutorial prerogatives can go...
...After ignoring the first summons, I received a second and ignored it...
...ILAUGHED, TOO...
...The defendant briefly grabbed the fifteenyearold daughter, before passing out a few minutes later...
...I think the defense attorney who picked me must have seen some evidence of a positive social ethic—or an exploitable social maladjustment?—in my answers and profile...
...he had several relatives in prison...
...he expressed animosity toward the whole legal process...
...My first court day primarily consisted of watching the attorneys play a mysterious game of questioning those of us in the jury pool about our past experiences as victims and suspects with the criminal justice system...
...They held the defendant guilty on three charges: cocaine use, illegal trespassing, and simple assault...
...The irony was that if we had been chosen to serve, we would have returned to our regular jobs after two days...
...I was young and self-centered and unimpressed...
...A "strike" excuses you from the case...
...He was a handcuffed young black man, no older than twenty-five, who looked rough, cynical, and, in every surface respect, like a stereotype on display...
...It is easy to tell ourselves, "All's well that ends well...
...In Savannah the attorneys have a limited number of "strikes" they use to narrow the jury pool...
...By then, it's too late...
...We were warned that the case involved sexual abuse of a minor...
...He seemed to have experienced a hallucinatory "freak out," as he put it...
Vol. 55 • January 2008 • No. 1
