Last year the folks at electoral-vote.com solicited stories from readers about jury duty experiences, the idea being to anticipate what kinds of things The Former Guy might encounter during his many trials. They printed several of the letters and indicated that they had many more to go, but at some point they discontinued the series. I was very late with my submission, and as it seems they won’t be publishing it, I might as well put it up here. I’ve previously written about all of these cases on this blog except the first one. I do have a long write-up on that case that I did years ago immediately after the case completed, and I intend to dust it off at some point and publish here one of these days.
I sometimes feel as though I’m a professional juror, as I’ve been called up for jury duty roughly every two to three years ever since I moved to Philadelphia in 1980. I think that’s partly because I’ve tended to move to a different apartment or house every three to five years, so the city computer resets my status every time I update my voter registration. Given that I only received two notices during the 12 year period when my living arrangements remained stable, that’s probably the case.
I’ve actually been selected to serve on a total of five panels, and each experience was quite different, from the way voir dire was conducted to the trial and deliberations. Two murder trials, one drug and weapons case, a shooting, and a civil trial.
One thing I learned very quickly. While people may hate serving on juries, they hate being foreperson even more. I was the foreman in nearly all the juries I served on simply by saying that I wouldn’t mind doing so if no one else wanted the position. In one case I was the last person to use the restroom only to come back into the jury room to find I had been selected foreman in my absence!
Back in the 80s, which seem like such simpler times now, we potential jurors gave our full addresses when we were questioned, but that’s long since changed; now we are only allowed to offer the general neighborhood where we live. It used to be that jurors were not allowed to take notes; in my most recent trial, we were given notebooks and encouraged to take notes, but those notebooks were collected at the conclusion of deliberations.
In the first murder trial, which lasted about a month, the judge, an older man, was especially hard on the prosecutor, a young woman. He chastised her regularly for the slightest thing, usually unfairly in the opinion of the jurors, and we joked among ourselves as to how quickly on any given day the prosecutor would lose her cool over the judge’s treatment. After about a week, we noticed that the defense lawyers began to make some really stupid blunders and the judge would come down hard on them as well. A few months after the trial was over, I happened upon one of the defense attorneys and asked him about that, and he admitted that they were afraid that the jurors might be getting too sympathetic to the young prosecutor over the judge’s harsh treatment, so they intentionally made silly mistakes to bring his wrath down upon them.
In the civil trial a white husband and wife were suing a Polish immigrant, claiming that his running a red light had caused a car crash which led to various permanent injuries to the husband plus loss of consortium. There was no disputing the running of the red light and the crash which occurred during the early morning hours, but immediately after the crash the husband didn’t seem to have sustained any serious injuries. Those only developed later. There were dueling medical experts, etc. When we started to deliberate, no one had any strong opinions one way or the other, although the white folks (including me) were leaning towards finding in favor of the defendant, while the Black and other minorities were leaning towards the plaintiffs. We had a thorough discussion, everybody got a chance to have their say, and we finally all amicably decided in favor of the defendant. I think the minority jurors may have originally tended to side with the plaintiffs because they perceived them as the victims, but once we had all discussed it, that perception changed. When I announced the decision in open court, the defendant, whose English was still not the best, broke down in tears, and the judge made a comment that perhaps, being an immigrant, he had not expected to receive a fair decision.
The shooting case ended in a mistrial during opening statements. There were two defense attorneys, and while one of them was giving his opening statement, the other one raised an objection, which threw the courtroom into confusion. All the attorneys huddled with the judge for a sidebar, and then they retired into the judge’s chambers. When they emerged, seemingly hours later, although it was probably only fifteen minutes or so, the judge explained to the jurors that he was declaring a mistrial and dismissing us. What had happened was that during the defense attorney’s opening statement, a police detective had brought a longish package into the courtroom and placed it on the prosecution table. The package looked like it might contain a shotgun, though, of course, it could have contained any number of other things. But according to the judge it had been agreed before the trial started that the shotgun would not be introduced into evidence, so he felt he had no choice but to declare a mistrial.
In the second murder trial the defense lawyer did something I haven’t encountered with any other trial attorney: he spoke in complete, well-structured paragraphs without any notes. After the trial I discovered he was currently a college professor and had mostly retired from criminal law; I suspect he had taken this particular case pro bono. He grilled one of the chief witnesses about his eyesight and his ability, or rather lack of it, to see without his glasses, and during his closing argument he mentioned that this was the first time he had ever had a Twelve Angry Men case that revolved around a witness not being able to see without glasses.
And then there was the drug and weapons charges case. I went into the jury room convinced that the defendant was innocent and that the other jurors would agree with me and we’d be in and out in a few minutes. I was shocked to find that most of them were ready to convict on all charges, and I had only two or three allies who leaned towards not guilty. Well, we discussed it, the deliberations remained civil, and eventually we voted not guilty on several of the lesser charges including the weapons offenses, but the others were adamant about the most serious drug charges, the ones with intent to sell. And by this time my allies for not guilty had deserted me. Now all the other jurors said: we compromised, what are you willing to compromise on?
And I was left with just my intuitive gut feeling that the defendant was innocent. Well, a gut feeling isn’t evidence, and while I could discount some of the evidence, I couldn’t ignore all of it. According to the testimony of the police, the drugs, after all, had been found in the defendant’s bedroom. I had no rational argument to counter that with as the defense had not put up any witnesses. So I compromised, and we found the defendant guilty of the most serious of the drug charges.
As I have a blog, I wrote up my experience on my blog.
Time passed. In fact, years passed.
One day I received a comment on that blog post from the defense attorney. He left his email and suggested I get in touch with him if I was interested in finding out what had happened after the trial was over. So I wrote to him, and he replied.
Keith, the defendant, he wrote, had been sentenced to 5 to 10 years in prison by the trial judge and was immediately taken into custody at the conclusion of the trial. A few years later one of Keith’s arresting officers was caught in a sting and arrested for planting evidence on a person he had arrested. He cooperated with the FBI and implicated all the officers involved in Keith’s case. Keith was released from prison after serving five years of his sentence, his conviction was expunged, and he has a lawsuit pending against the officers and the city. (That lawsuit may have been settled by now, I don’t know.) Meanwhile, only the first officer, the one arrested in the sting and who implicated the others, only he did any prison time. The others ended up being acquitted after a long trial and, after appealing their suspensions, got their jobs as police officers back.
The next time I was called up for jury duty, I indicated on the questionnaire that I would be less likely to believe what a police officer said. I was quickly eliminated.