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My experience with jury duty

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For years, i considered jury duty an imposition, a waste of my time, best avoided when possible.  Then a few years ago, i was called and couldn’t get out of it.  That experience changed my perspective 180 degrees, and today i look forward to serving, to perform this important civic responsibility.

The process is tedious, no doubt.  When you get your notice in the mail, you have to fill out a card or fill out an online form to validate some of the information used when randomly selected.  It means a day out of work – though by law employers in MA are required to pay you for jury duty time away from work.  Travel for my service in 2016 was 45+ minutes from home when two other courthouses are  closer, 20 and 30 minutes away.  The courthouse itself is a stark brick government building with metal detectors at the door – i appreciate that – and if you arrive on time, 8AM, you sit on a wooden bench for 15-20 minutes before they usher you into a conference room where they collect another form of mostly the information completed online.

Once again, we wait.  The toilets are just off the room – jurors can’t be exposed to prosecutors, defendant or lawyers – with light-weigh doors, so if you have to use them, every juror hears.   At about 9:15 a court officer turned on a video that described the jury process, including a little history.

The history is fascinating, and included some of these facts: the right of a trial by one’s peers was originally secured in the Magna Carta in 1215 under a weakened King John.  The Pilgrims and Puritans, having to govern themselves upon their arrival to America, institutionalized the right.  John Adams, our second president and author of our Massachusetts Constitution, specifically named the right of trial by jury in that document; the Massachusetts Constitution became the framework of our US Constitution, where the right to a trial by jury is also spcifically included, both in the original document and in the Bill of Rights.  This abridged right was also listed as a grievance in our Declaration of Independence, authored by another Massachusetts leader, John Hancock.  This right is not common throughout the world today.  Trial by one’s peers is a sacred right, limiting the power of government to abuse laws.

The video also explained who the various characters are for the day’s activities.

About 15 minutes after the video ended, our judge came in and explained that there were 8 trials on today’s docket, but that three were afraid of the jury and would be handled by the judge, three were in the late process of settling, and that two could involve us.  While we’re waiting to hear, I’ll cite why my first experience in a jury trial was so powerful to me.

The case was a drug sale case, crack cocaine, sold on the street.  Little dealer stuff.  For me the tragedy was above all how clearly it showed that the defendant was involved in the only economic opportunity readily available to him in his city.  But that issue was not on trial, only an observation from that day.

There was a clear undercurrent of something they weren’t telling us.  The case was old, having occurred nearly five years earlier.  It involved a sting operation by undercover State Police, where the defendant sold crack to one of the cops working this sting.  The police officers were credible, easily deflecting the defense attorney’s challenge that these guys do a lot of these, how could they remember so well?  They did.

The only discrepancy between the two cops’ versions of event were the material of the defendant’s coat: nylon or leather.  Both described it as red and black.  Seemed like a minor issue.  Defense spent a lot of time on that, but it didn’t resonate with me… or other members of the jury as it turned out.

At the end of the trial, which took about three hours, the judge read a lengthy legal guidance paper on identification including how important credible identification is.

When the bailiff sent us to our room to discuss the case, i asked him for some guidance (i was the foreman), and he dismissed me with, ‘you have to figure that out’, and closed the door.

Everyone gave their own version of what they thought, and we had about 8-9 ready to call guilty with 3-4 not quite ready.  But within another hour of allaying the hold-outs’ concerns, they agreed to the verdict, guilty.  All told, we took maybe two hours to reach our verdict.

The next morning i called a friend at the court, and asked him about the trial.  He was acutley aware of it.  He also knew I was there, which really surprised me.  The undercurrent ws real.

Turns out, our trial was a re-trial.  The first verdict had been appealed; successfully, based on inadequate legal instruction by the original judge on the matter of identification.  The coat material discrepancy was the crux of the identification.  Had we found the defendant not guilty, he would have had a basis for a lawsuit against the city for false arrest and false imprisonment.  He’d’ve had a big lottery ticket.  The number projected by my court friend was a million bucks, not chump change.   I also learned that the defendant had already served his time, 5 years reduced to two; but he had a chance to be compensated since the system may have failed him.  Ultimately it didn’t fail him nor the city.  At the end, the system worked.  It doesn’t always, but it did in this case.

So at the end of the process, frustratingly slow, deliberate, socially awkward (17 people in a small room with very little to say to one another), and often exposed to the reality of life in the underbelly of society, the process has a way of discerning facts, adding each of the jurors’ own life experiences to make judgments, negotiate, and settle on an agreed answer or solution.  The collective wisdom of 12 strangers has the power, and responsibility, to determine the fate of people who come to court for justice.  And in that experience, justice emerged.

As I finished this recollection, the bailiff came into our waiting room and dismissd us.  No trial for us.  But the fact that we were ready to pass our collective judgement no doubt affected negotiations elsewhere in the building.


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