Law And Order

Jury Duty

I had been summoned for jury duty. Last week I went to the courthouse where I filled out a thirty page questionnaire alongside about fifty other people. This week we all went back to the courthouse to be questioned further to select the twelve jurors and three alternates. There was a lot of standing around in the hall with only two benches for the fifty of us. 

The judge, the prosecutor and defense attorney repeatedly explained that the defendant was presumed innocent and that it was the prosecutor’s job to build a case against him. We could not know and were not permitted to consider what penalty might come down on the defendant if we found him guilty. We were supposed to evaluate the testimony of all witnesses with the same standards, and not prejudge that some testimonies might have greater or lesser value. We were not supposed to let emotions, such as sympathy for the victim (it was a murder trial) interfere with the weighing of the evidence. They literally drew an imaginary box, and told us that we could only consider what they put in the box. 

Many people expressed reservations. In each case the judge asked if they could put those reservations aside and just focus on the evidence in this particular case. Most people said they could. Everyone said they would treat the testimony of a police officer the same as they would, to quote the judge, “a banker, an engineer or a teacher.” I thought these were interesting comparisons, since each of them is a very high-trust occupation, and I wondered if the judge intended to throw the mantle of their presumed trustworthiness onto the police.

By the time my name was called, all twelve members of the jury had been chosen and only the three alternates were left. Everything went smoothly until they asked me the question about the testimony of a police officer. 

I have to say that by this point I felt like I was in an alternate reality, in which police don’t lie and people are explicitly told to take actions without regard for consequences. One in which we had been placed in a box, stripped of context, with only two possible outcomes. It reminded me of the way medicine used to be practiced, and in some circumstances still is: there is the patient, the germ, and the drug or surgery. The victim, the perpetrator, the police and prison.

Things are different now in medicine. Doctors have to take into account the patient’s environment, family, work, stress and past trauma. Germs, though still potent, have slipped in importance and disease is now a complicated structure of diet, activity, some difficult to define genetic component, the bacteria in one’s gut and still more stress and trauma. The drugs are no longer just miraculous lifesavers (although some still do save millions of lives every year), but come with side effects, resistance and astronomical costs.

In the city where I live the police have been under federal oversight for decades because of their ongoing abuse of citizens and lying. They just don’t seem to be able to stop. In city after city, abuse and lying appear to be endemic in police culture. It makes sense. Although Spiderman may express the belief that with great power comes great responsibility, and we may want to believe that of the police, the other truth about power is that it corrupts. 

Some people say it is just a few bad apples. I would like to think that if I found myself in a barrel of apples, and some were bad, I’d want to get rid of those bad ones so I wouldn’t get moldy myself. But we don’t see that. What we see is that the supposed good apples have formed a union which not only makes it hard to get rid of bad apples, but also insists that police officers must be immune to consequences if they abuse their power or lie.

We the people are in a bind. We want the police to respond appropriately in situations of danger, and they often do. We don’t want them to profile us, unjustly accuse us, brutalize us or lie, but they often do, and most commonly to people with darker skins. I was one of two Black people on the jury panel, both of us women. The defendant was Black.

The judge and attorneys asked us if we watched police procedural tv shows like Law and Order or CSI. I recently read a profile of Dick Wolf, the creator of Law and Order, in which he said, in essence, that the New York Police Department had been very supportive of the show, provided they always portrayed the police and prosecutors in a good light. No arresting or brutalizing the wrong guy. No piling on charges to force an innocent defendant to take a plea. No lying. There were rare instances of unjust imprisonment, but these were swiftly corrected. Most of the suspects were white and often middle class, because it preserved the illusion of race- and class-blindness that the police wanted to maintain. I think one term for all this might be “gaslighting.”

So when they asked, I said I would not be able to give the testimony of a police officer the same weight as, say, a barber. The police have tarnished their reputation and I would not be able to trust the word of a police officer. They might be telling the truth, but there would be no way to know if this was a so-called good apple. And I could not set that aside for this one case, because it is in the courtroom that it is most crucial to be absolutely certain about the truth of the matter. 

There was a break then, and we all went out and stood in the hallway for another half hour, and when they called us back in, I was thanked and excused.

This was the closest I had gotten to being on a jury. When I was younger and had more responsibilities I used to blow off the summons, always a little afraid they would come after me, and feeling a little regret about not fulfilling a civic duty. Now I’m okay with not having been picked. 

I think I may have more to say about this, but this is already a long post. I will probably be able to come back to it in a later post.