Jury Duty

The American legal system, I can now say from first-hand participation in it, is a lot like sausage, in the sense that if you're a fan of either fair trials or good sausage, you'd best not watch either of them in the process of production.

I have just been a cog in the American justice system, and I feel dirty, and a bit sick.  I'm not trying to make you feel dirty or sick, but I'll tell you about my experience anyway, because it was also very interesting, to me, at least.

There were hundreds of people standing in line in the rain outside of the Multnomah County Courthouse, most of them there reporting for jury duty.  It's a brand-new building on the Willamette River in downtown Portland, with big windows on every floor featuring magnificent views of the cityscape, and the mountains beyond it.

Having been to the old courthouse, it occurred to me that this one was better, if only because judges and juries who are deciding the fate of their fellow human beings should do so in a comfortable room with a nice view, so they might stand a chance of not being in too miserable a mood while making decisions that will likely change people's lives in all kinds of ways.

The building and the jury selection process struck me as well-designed, except for the part about hundreds of people having to stand outside in the rain in order to slowly trickle into the building, since everyone has to go through a security screening, like at the airport -- and except for the cafe in the big beautiful building having abominable coffee.

We were herded up to a large room on the third floor where an engaging and entertaining woman with a fairly thick Japanese accent spoke at the lectern and gave us the run-down as far as what to expect from the jury duty experience.  She showed us some videos about how jury deliberations work, and another video about subconscious bias.  She told a story about the couple that first met as fellow jurors, and eventually got married in the same courtroom.

A judge gave a speech to us all about the importance of jury duty to the functioning of our society.  He talked about the pandemic, and how there weren't such gatherings like these happening then, and therefore justice wasn't being done.

Reflecting on that at the time, I assumed he was suggesting that because jury trials weren't happening, and judges were dismissing all kinds of charges because people couldn't be afforded their rights to a jury trial, justice wasn't getting done.  People who committed crimes were often not being convicted for them, as I recall, because of this problem.

I wondered at that moment as I do at this moment, whether justice was served better or worse with all these cases having to be dismissed during the pandemic.  I really don't know.

You have to be a US citizen over the age of 18 and a few other qualifications, in order to be on a jury.  I assume there are hundreds of thousands of residents of this county who would qualify, so it was a bit surprising to hear from this judge in his speech that there are only 38,000 people in the county who respond to the summons for jury duty.  To quote the Japanese lady, this crowd gets recycled often.

A musician who has recorded on several albums with me at Big Red Studio was there in the line when I was, and he was directed to his jury room just before I was sent off to mine.

Prior to that, although most everyone was sitting in seats, rather than wandering around the room, I had to wander around the room.  All the really comfortable seats were taken, for one thing, with just the more stiff-backed chairs left available.  But mainly I just wanted to get some impression of who was in there with me.

I knew it would be skewing in the direction of US citizens, rather than just Green Card holders and such.  And I knew it would be skewing in the direction of people who could afford to or otherwise manage to take a couple days off from work or whatever they do, on a weekday.

As I discovered over the years living here in Portland, it's exceedingly easy to get out of doing jury duty if you don't want to do it.  In the past, I got one of these summonses, and I just told them I was on tour at the time they wanted me in, which was true, and that was it.  Another time I answered the summons and didn't get picked to serve on a jury.

Looking around the room what I saw appeared to be a pretty good cross-section of Portlanders, of the sort who are citizens and have stable housing, with an address at which to receive a summons.  The crowd was fairly diverse, ethnically, but severely lacking in Black people.  One of the few Black people in the room was the judge who gave the inspiring speech about the importance of juries during our orientation.

I was taken to the courtroom of the judge who would be presiding over the case for which I had been selected as a potential juror.  They take 40 people at first, then ask us all kinds of personal questions, so the lawyers could choose who to reject and who to accept as jurors.

I answered the summons in the first place because I was interested in experiencing the process, of being on a jury, having never done this before.  I figured if someone's going to do it, it might as well be a nice, conscientious, considerate, anti-racist person like me.

It was again noticeable, thinking about the whole "jury of your peers" concept, that once again there were no visibly Black Americans in the room, although, as we'd soon find out, the defendant was a young Black man.

As the questioning went on it became very clear that of the forty potential jurors in the room with me, most people had a strong interest in the idea of a fair trial, and in the idea of civic engagement.  Other things that I found of interest was how many people answered affirmatively to the question of whether they had any close friends or relatives who were cops.  It was about 10 of us, which seems high.  Two of us had been mugged at gunpoint (me being one of them).  About 10 of us had never been the victim of a crime.

Having not only been mugged at gunpoint, but having had my housemate killed by gun violence, having had a car stolen, cars broken into multiple times, one home destroyed by arson, another broken into by thieves, my identity stolen once, and surely other things I'm forgetting, I found it shocking to hear fellow Americans saying they had never been the victim of a crime.

After admitting to having been mugged at gunpoint I figured that was it, the defense was going to reject me.  But maybe the defense lawyer liked my IWW hoodie, or my answer to another question, about what I thought of the US criminal justice system.  In any case, I was one of the 12 chosen for the jury.

It was 13 at first, but then they eliminated one of us, apparently at random, because the 13th is just to make sure there are enough jurors so they don't have to drop or delay the trial, in case one of them doesn't show up for deliberations.

This was a domestic violence case.  I learned the acronym, "DV," this week, which apparently everyone who watches crime shows is already familiar with.  There were a lot of fans of crime shows in that crowd of 40.

The defense and the prosecution lawyers made their cases to the 13 of us, presented evidence methodically, interviewed the woman who wanted to press charges against the guy in the first place.  She had called the cops, reluctantly, in fear for what might happen next in the unwelcome saga with the guy she met on a dating app who wouldn't leave her house and constantly carried around a gun.

The next morning, the 12 of us remaining met in our jury room.  We were on the tenth floor of this building, with a view of the buildings and streets beneath us, including the parking garage where you could see the cars of some of the jurors, including mine, parked on the roof.

Around the big table in the room were two doctors, two school teachers, a social worker, someone who worked in a warehouse, a USPS letter carrier, a musician (me), and a project manager who had a lot of experience running meetings, so when I nominated her to be the head juror, everyone readily agreed that this was a good plan.

What went on in that room for a bit less than two hours was very serious, intense but respectful discussion.  Everyone clearly felt the weight of the situation.  We were deciding someone's fate, based on the evidence and testimony we had seen, and the instructions we were given.

It was truly a discussion like no other I had ever engaged in.  There was not unanimity at the beginning.  It seemed clear to me, and still does, that although both lawyers made their cases reasonably eloquently and engagingly, in a case that relied on a jury deciding whether they trusted the testimony of someone who claimed to have had her life threatened by her gun-toting boyfriend, neither side presented any witnesses who could vouch for the character of either of the main people involved with this case.

For the prosecution, this was perhaps because they didn't really need any more evidence.  There was video evidence, and it was incredibly damning.  So at least for that particular count of threatening with a deadly weapon, if we could infer that that's what he indeed had in his hand in the video, that was pretty clear.

For the other charges it was about whether we trusted what the woman claimed had happened.  But if the testimony of a witness under oath is part of the evidence to be considered, as the judge explained, then in the complete absence of any evidence to the contrary, like anyone having anything nice to say about the defendant, if there was any reason to question the preponderance of evidence we were being presented with, we didn't have it.

The idea that there was "reasonable doubt" that she wasn't telling the truth about having been threatened by him while brandishing a firearm the month prior to the time he did that on video just didn't seem convincing, under the circumstances.  So he was found guilty not only of the incident caught on the video, but on the other gun-threatening incident as well, along with the other charges, all of which involved clear physical evidence.

What if the guy had been rich?  Then, I'd guess, he'd have witnesses to vouch for how wonderful he is, and how untrustworthy his ex is.  He'd have a more evolved strategy to convince us that the gun the cops found with him when they arrested him was not the same gun he had in the video, which, perhaps, was actually an airsoft gun or a BB gun.

But no, although his lawyer did make that argument, no one was convinced by it in the jury room.

What if there was a single journalist in the room, or friends of either the perpetrator or the victim, or witnesses aside from cops, and one guy who seemed to barely know the defendant?  Plus a woman who came with him -- the two of which made up the small, lonely audience for this trial, who wasn't being paid to sit there in a police uniform.  Who knows, maybe more witnesses testifying could have changed the whole picture.

There were all sorts of factors we weren't supposed to consider in the case, but that concept is very much like ignoring the elephants in the living room.  The defendant had a tear drop tattoo beneath his eye.  This is a tattoo people sometimes get in prison.  Sometimes they get one teardrop for each year they spend behind bars.

There was incriminating evidence presented which had obviously come from phone calls recorded while he was in prison.  You could hear the sounds of other prisoners talking in the background.  If you had had conversations with prisoners who were talking on phones in the general population section of a prison, it was that kind of echo and background conversation, very recognizable.

The second day the defendant came into the courtroom, he had a patch over the eye that had the teardrop tattoo on it, so the tattoo was covered.  Had something happened to his eye, or had he hoped we'd have more sympathy for him if we didn't know he had spent years in prison?

It might have been better for him if he had worn that patch the other day, too, rather than just on one of the days.  I learned after our deliberations, though, that apparently some of the folks in the jury had not cottoned on to any of that until I mentioned it to them.  Others had.  I wonder if there was evidence we didn't get to look at that might have made the defendant look any better, or only evidence that stood to make him look worse?

In any case, now one more very troubled woman may feel slightly less endangered, living in the city of Portland, at least for a while longer.  And one very troubled man will spend yet more time in an American prison, likely emerging even more troubled when he gets out.

Has justice been served?  I certainly don't think so.

I spoke at length with one of my fellow jurors, who had also parked on the roof of the nearby parking garage.  Like me, he had a penchant for parking on the roofs of these structures.  Like me, he was originally from Connecticut.  Like me, he and his family were renting their home in Portland, watching the housing crisis lay waste to the nation.  It was quickly apparent he was just as much of an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist sort as me.  We exchanged phone numbers before parting.

I suspect there were others among the dozen of us who might have shared the sort of worldview that I seemed to share with this one.  Which altogether just seems like even more evidence of a decrepit justice system.  It didn't matter what civic-minded, anti-racist, do-gooder, radicals any of us might have been.  The options were all bad ones, and in the end, we picked one of them.