Jury Duty

I had jury duty a few months ago, and was put on a case that lasted a week. I thought I would write about it here because I was sure it would be the height of ridiculousness, but it ended up being a surprisingly emotional experience. I did eventually write down some reflections on what happened, mostly as a form of catharsis, but hesitated to post anything here because it is so different than the silly stuff I usually share. But I recently ran into one of the other jurors on the train, which has me thinking about everything that happened again, and I am also currently reading The New Jim Crow, which has me thinking a lot about my former students and my work in general, so I have decided to share my experience with a (very slightly) broader audience.

(The names of everyone involved have been changed.)

I was annoyed when I received my first jury duty summons, but I was also mildly excited – I’ve spent the majority of my life obsessively watching Law & Order, now here was my chance to see the live version! Plus, it was an excuse to spend a day away from the office, and happily the courthouse was only a few blocks from my house. I dutifully reported at my appointed day and time, and was immediately impressed by the realness of it all – from the metal detectors at the front entrance, to the smartly dressed lawyers zipping down the hallways with their rolling fileboxes, to the clusters of uniformed policemen presumably discussing the gory details of some soon-to-be sentenced crime. I felt like I was on the set of a Philadelphia crime drama.

As I moved through the stages of jury selection and kept getting called back, my anticipation grew. For the final stage of selection, I sat in a courtroom – with a witness stand! And a court reporter! And a bailiff! – while the judge, assistant district attorney (who would be prosecuting this particular case), and defense lawyer asked me questions about my current and past employment, length of time spent living in Philadelphia, and experience with the criminal justice system. After they had conferred over my answers in private, the judge told me “congratulations,” I had been chosen to serve on the jury and fulfill my civic duty. My fellow jurors later said that they found his congratulations ironic given their annoyance with having to serve, but I took it to heart.

The trial began the next day, as did my gradual realization that this was not going to be as entertaining a diversion as I had initially thought. Part of my reality check was the sheer tedium of many of the courtroom processes – whenever one of us needed a bathroom break we all had to be escorted from the room and back together, and suddenly half an hour of that day’s trial time was gone. The judge often had to read us lengthy sets of instructions on how we were to interpret various evidence that was about to be presented, and after forty minutes of his low voice and slow recitation it was a struggle to keep my eyes open. We were often kept waiting to enter the courtroom for hours at a time, with no real explanation as to why and only a few old magazines to occupy the time (we had to turn in our cell phones every morning, so no Angry Birds or facebook browsing).

But the real revelation was the case itself. The three main players were Leron (the defendant), Jerome (his best friend), and Jazmine (Leron’s baby’s mother and sometimes-girlfriend). Two years ago, while Leron and Jazmine were on a break, she began dating Stanley, who had a job and would treat her to meals and pay for her children’s food and clothes. Leron became jealous and threatened Stanley, who informed him that he had a gun and a license to carry it. Allegedly, Leron then masterminded a plan to rob Stanley of his gun and any money he had on him by having Jazmine lure him to a neighborhood bar, then – with Jerome’s help – jumping him on a dark side street. Jazmine did her part and brought Stanley to the bar, where Leron and Jerome were waiting for him. But instead of proceeding with the robbery as planned, Leron pulled out a gun and shot Stanley in the head.

Miraculously, the bullet only grazed the top of Stanley’s head, and after spending a few hours in the ER he was released. It didn’t take long for Leron, Jazmine, and Jerome to be arrested in relation to the shooting, or for Jazmine and Jerome to accept pleas in exchange for testifying at Leron’s trial. Two years of statements, paperwork, and preliminary hearings later, here we all were.

Jazmine testified first, and longest. It took nearly three days for the ADA to get through all his questions for her; partially because she spoke so softly – frequently through tears – that the judge had to ask her to repeat everything into the microphone multiple times, but mostly because – as became painfully clear – she had a lot of difficulty processing what she was being asked. Question after question, she would hedge around giving a direct answer as the ADA became increasingly frustrated, until she finally asked what a key word in the question meant.

“Did you decline to give a statement to the defendant’s attorney last summer?”

“Well… I’m not sure.”

“Last summer, Leron’s attorney asked you to give a statement, and you declined. Correct?”

“Yes… no… maybe.”

“Well, the record here states that you declined to give a statement, and there is no statement from you on that date. So, I’ll ask you again: did you decline to give a statement last summer?”

“What does ‘decline’ mean?”

This happened over, and over, and over again. Not just on technical legal jargon, of which there was plenty. But on basic words that were just a level above everyday conversation: Decline. Waive. Avert. And, as if the implications of this literacy gap on her ability to fully function as a citizen weren’t brutally obvious enough, there was also this exchange:

“When you were first arrested, you immediately told police about Leron’s plan and your involvement in it.”

“Yes.”

“Then later you changed parts of your story. Why did you say the things you said at first if they weren’t true?”

“I was scared. I had never been in real trouble before. I just said what they wanted me to say.”

“But, didn’t the police read your rights to you? Didn’t they tell you that you didn’t have to say anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, here is your signature on a document stating that you received your rights. Is this your signature?”

“I signed it, but I didn’t understand what it meant.”

Worse than Jazmine’s testimony, for me, was Jerome’s. From the moment he took the stand, he reminded me of many of my former students: so quick-witted that his underlying intelligence was undeniable, yet simultaneously committed to putting on a tough front and downplaying his own brightness. Unlike Jazmine, he spoke confidently into the mic and never needed to ask for vocabulary help. Also unlike Jazmine, even with the plea he had accepted, he would be doing ten to twenty years for his role in the botched robbery. He had swaggered into the courtroom, grinned on the stand, and acted unperturbed when his sentence was mentioned, but he became quiet when the ADA asked him what happened after he and Leron confronted Stanley.

The ADA pushed him to continue. “When you and Leron saw Stanely on the street, did you rob him as you had planned?”

“No.”

“What happened instead?”

“He shot him.”

“Who shot who? Please describe in detail what you saw.”

“Leron pulled out a gun… I didn’t even know he had a gun. I heard it fire. I saw the man’s head go back, and he fell to the ground. Leron ran away. I just stood there… I had never seen anything like that.”

When he described seeing the force of the bullet jerk Stanley’s head backwards, the rest of Jerome’s tough demeanor fell away and he began to cry. He furiously rubbed at his eyes and tried to stop, and from that point forward he only stared at his lap. He was eighteen when he saw his best friend shoot a stranger in the head. He will most likely be pushing forty by the time he gets out of prison. That night I sat on my couch and sobbed, like I had every night for my first three months of teaching.

The remainder of the witnesses went quickly – the patrolman who had been first on the scene, the detective who had worked the case, the guard who had been in the holding cell room when Leron saw Jazmine for the first time after the shooting and screamed at her for talking to the police. Their testimony was disturbing in the details mentioned in passing – Leron’s home hadn’t been searched because he had no home, he stayed with Jazmine when she would have him and on friends’ sofas when she wouldn’t. Police had spoken to Jazmine the year before when they were called for a domestic dispute between her and Leron – he had choked her unconscious, but she didn’t want to press charges because he was already on parole. These things were mentioned with the nonchalance of common, everyday occurrences – because in this context, they were.

The deliberations went fairly quickly as well. While we all felt that Leron most likely shot Stanley, none of us could say he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt – there was no physical evidence, and the only eyewitnesses were Jazmine and Jerome, who had both changed their stories several times between their initial arrests, preliminary hearings, pleas, and testimony during the trial. Stanley could say that there were two men who had chased him, but they were both wearing masks so he couldn’t identify them. He said the man who had shot him was 5’5” and using a 9 mm; Leron was 6’0” and allegedly carrying a revolver (and, as someone with a license to carry a firearm, Stanley would have known the difference). There was just too much uncertainty to convict. Leron – who had spent the entire trial staring straight ahead with a stony expression – wept when the forewoman read the not guilty verdict.

After that – after the ADA pounded his desk in frustration, after the bailiff escorted us out of the jury box for the last time, after we had turned in our juror badges and collected $127 each for our seven days of service – it was over. Just like that, I walked out of the courtroom and out of the criminal justice system, while Jerome and Jazmine stayed behind. Jerome, who is going to prison for ten to twenty years for naively choosing to accompany his best friend on an ill-conceived plot when he was eighteen – just as almost any teenager would follow their best friend anywhere – despite never having held a gun, pulled a trigger, or robbed anyone himself. Jazmine, whose two kids will be motherless, and likely homeless like Leron, while she serves her time for conspiracy. And those two are just from this one case, from this one courtroom – the criminal justice center where I served is an enormous building; its online directory lists 38 criminal judges in addition to the one whose courtroom I was in. That’s 39 criminal courtrooms churning through cases like this one every day, and that’s just Philadelphia.

Since I finished my jury service, I can’t stop thinking about how insanely, stupidly privileged I am. Privileged that I spent the first twenty-five years of my life without having a single interaction with the criminal justice system, or any facet of the justice system. Privileged that I didn’t even know where the courthouse was, even though I have lived five blocks away from it for the past two years. Privileged that I thought an attempted murder trial would be entertaining and exciting, because it would be like what I watch on TV – not like my reality. Privileged that homelessness, abuse, and parole aren’t so ingrained into my life and the lives of my friends and family that they are casually mentioned in passing as mere auxiliary details. Privileged that I have never seen anyone get shot, don’t know anyone who has ever been shot, and likely never will. Privileged that I received a high quality education, so I can understand my legal rights and I can converse with lawyers, doctors, judges, and whatever other professionals I may need to without difficulty. Privileged that bad choices I made when I was eighteen didn’t ruin my life – and that, even if my mistakes had been more serious, my family would have had the resources to hire a lawyer who wouldn’t have allowed me to spend a decade or two in prison for watching my friend commit a crime. Privileged to be white, the same race as the judge, the ADA, and the defense lawyer – the race that, for the most part, makes and enforces the laws, and then – surprise! – just happens to be under-represented in our jails and prisons.

I took my students on a field trip my first year of teaching, and on our way out of the Bronx we passed an NYC correctional facility. I hadn’t even known what the building was, but as we passed by almost all of my students pointed it out and named the occupants they knew and visited – brothers, uncles, fathers, and cousins. I wondered then, as I again wonder now, how many of them will spend time there themselves. The question isn’t even if any of them will spend time there – given the abysmal graduation rate of the neighborhood high school and the grim incarceration statistics for men of color, especially those without a high school degree, that some of my former students will spend time in prison is a virtual certainty. The questions are just which ones, for how long, and whether they will ever be able to extricate themselves from the criminal justice system once they are caught up in it.

It is hard to continue to function in a society when you can look at a group of children and know that many of them are going to end up in jail, solely because of the race and socioeconomic status they happened to be born into. And so we pretend it doesn’t happen, that it’s not that bad, that the criminal justice system is indeed about justice and that the only people who end up in prison are those who deserve to be there by virtue of their own flawed and criminal natures. That’s what structural inequity is, and that’s why it’s so overwhelming – the entire system is set up not only to disadvantage large groups of people, but also to obscure that there even are larger forces at play. If we just took one in five black male babies and put them in jail, or if we just didn’t let half of children growing up in poverty attend school at all, there would be a tremendous outcry. Instead, one in five black men who don’t attend college have been incarcerated by their 20s, and half of children growing up in poverty don’t graduate high school. The devastation is the same, but we can turn a blind eye to its obvious racial and economic roots and pretend we aren’t complicit in the injustice.

I am glad I was called to jury duty and chosen to serve on this trial. I hope I continue to get called in the future. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it was an important one. It reminded me of how privileged I am to have the life that I do, and that – given that I did nothing to deserve my privilege – it would be unconscionable for me to spend my life doing anything other than working to end structural inequity in all its forms, particularly the educational inequity that I have so richly benefitted from while other, smarter people never had the opportunities I did. I now fully believe that jury duty is a true civic responsibility, and not just because anyone accused of a crime has the right to trial by a jury of their peers. It is our civic responsibility to bear witness to what structural inequity does to poor people and people of color in this country – how it destroys their lives and their families. Having born witness, we can’t pretend that it doesn’t happen or that we aren’t implicated. And knowing that we are implicated, we can’t sit back and wait for someone else to fix it.