Do you, and each of you, understand and agree that you will well and truly try the cause now pending before this court, and a true verdict render according only to the evidence presented to you and to the instructions of the court? If so, and having done it, you are duly appreciated:
I was a juror in the court of Judge Ritchie. Here's how it went:
Day 1: I and @50 others of my fellow citizens assemble in a conference room where we are shown a video exhorting us and thanking us for doing our civic duty. We file downstairs, through the metal detectors, and are seated in a courtroom, which we fill near to overflowing. We are sworn in, and thus begins a day that can only be described as booooooring. 18 are called, they sit in the box and before it, and are asked, as a group, what they think about driving under the influence of alcohol [DUI] and whether they happen to know officer X, Y, or Z, or, more generally, are involved with law enforcement in any way at all. Those who do not answer in such a fashion as to deter the judge are then asked, individually, for a few details--job, household makeup, previous jury experience--that the lawyers may use to flush them from the box. I, who am wearing gloves to cover up my
Hand, Foot, and Mouth pustules, am not eliminated. Almost everyone else is: by the end of the day there are we twelve, two alternates, and half a dozen still left in the pool. It is really quite remarkable how many people have been affected in some way by DUI. Most everybody it seems.
Day 2: We return in the afternoon to hear the case. It ain't much: a gas station attendant testifies that she noticed the defendant about to pee on the wall of her facility, that she asked him to use the bathroom, and then dialed 911 to report it; that he, stinking of alcohol, then asked to use the bathroom, and soon after left. Despite some difficulty exiting his parking space, he made it back out on to the street where he was immediately picked up by one of the three responding patrol cars. Here the testimony of one of those officers takes up the story: the defendant drove two blocks, weaving in his lane, made a right turn, and then pulled into a convenience store lot in response to the police lightbar. The officer can smell alcohol ten feet off and, upon approaching the car, discovers it, front and back, full of
tall boys in various states of consumption. The story is corroborated by the second officer's testimony, who, alike with the first, points out that the driver did not respond in any way to the officers and eventually had to be half carried to the patrol car where, asked to take a breathalyzer, he started muttering "no test, no test." The officers, having discovered two more seemingly inebriated people in the back seat and sent them home, proceed to impound the vehicle and take the defendant off to jail. The third officer is not called. The defendant does not testify. So that's all we have to go on: the testimony of three witnesses and their cross-examinations.
Day 3: We return again in the afternoon to hear closing arguments and receive our instructions. There's not a lot more to say, but the lawyers take some time saying it anyway. The instructions, it turns out, cover many pages and address such matters as "beyond a reasonable doubt" and the definition of DUI and refusal to take a chemical test, the second charge upon which we will have to deliberate. And, too, it takes a while for the lawyers and judge, in private session, to decide just what those instructions will be. Critically, the instructions contain a stipulation to the effect that defense and prosecution agree that the defendant understood what was being asked of him when he was asked to take the test, and that he knew his responsibility to do so before the law: given this, if we rule guilty on the first charge it is very difficult to see how we will be unable to rule guilty on the second. After quite some time we are allowed to retire to the back room to deliberate. To my surprise, it turns out there's a lot of deliberation to be done, much more than an hour or two, which is all we have left that day, and so we return for...
Day 4: It soon appears that 10 of us think he's guilty: the decision to pee on the wall of an open gas station, the difficulty driving, the stench of alcohol, the open beers in the car, leaves no reasonable doubt in our minds, mine among them. But two of us don't think it's so simple. One of these is easily converted though: overnight she has become filled with doubts, but while they are very interesting doubts having mostly to do with the nature of reality and truth, we are able to convince her that they aren't very reasonable ones and are therefore best set aside. The single holdout, however, doesn't trust the cops' story, and is prepared to let the case hang on the fact that they didn't search the parking lot for open liquor that someone else might have left around, that they didn't interrogate the two passengers, that they didn't ask the unresponsive driver to walk a straight line or touch his nose, in short that the police didn't treat a routine DUI like a federal case or anticipate that this, of the hundreds of DUIs they'd been involved in, would end up in court, and that if it did we, the jury, would require that everything be totally unambiguous in order to render a guilty verdict.
How to resolve this? We debate back and forth, around in circles, the afternoon grows shorter, the snacks start to run out. Eventually the lone juror restates his objection as an assumption that the police arrived at the scene already certain that they were dealing with a DUI and were thus prejudiced to find the evidence they did and--read carefully here--that if he could hear the gas station attendant's testimony again in which the attendant informed the police dispatcher that the defendant was clearly drunk he would join us in a guilty verdict. Looks were exchanged around the room as various among us tried to decide whether to point out to him the logical inconsistency of his request, but within seconds a silent consensus had been reached: quick, get a copy of that testimony before he changes his mind! The bailiff was called, took our note to the judge, returned a while later with a boombox and a CD of the relevant part of the proceedings. We pressed play, the gas station attendant testified again that the defendant was clearly wasted, and the final vote was secured. There was no debate at all over the second charge, i.e., the willful refusal to take a test, so we filed back into the courtroom, registered our results, and, having done so, were invited to stay after by the judge, who promised to have a few words for us once he had finished the proceedings.
All of us, except, oddly enough, the standout juror, waited behind, and it was well worth the additional 10 minutes. We had been puzzled by the defense's willingness to concede the second charge; the judge told us that if they had not, the prosecution would have insisted on raising the issue of the defendant's previous DUI on the grounds that while previous guilt could not be used to judge the present DUI, it was clear evidence that he did understand what was being asked of him vis a vis testing, having been asked such a thing under similar circumstances not so very long ago. Needless to say this not only answered that point but left us with an even higher degree of certainty that we had called this one right.
I write at such length because I have a few things to say about this process and about how well it seems to work, given a certain standard of justice and my admittedly limited exposure, and because I want you, the reader, to have the evidence before you, so to speak. That said, my conclusions:
- No one wants to serve on a jury, and certainly none of the people who did serve on this one wished to. This is reasonable: the selection process is terribly boring, at times even obscure, and it promises more of the same to come. Despite this, once selected no one seems to have been willing to cut corners. This was a minor case, the defense was essentially non-existent, and yet it took us hours to reach a guilty verdict: right or wrong, people did their best.
- The selection process appears to have been designed solely to remove any trace of a possible objection to those eventually chosen and without a thought for efficiency. Again, for this minor case, a judge, two lawyers on the public bill, two bailiffs, a court clerk, and fifty or more people spent an entire day in selection. Let's assume minimum wage for all (hardly likely) and that none of the people were sheepherders: $8 * 8 * 60 = almost $4,000. The real figure is probably ten times that. This is not how things are done in (any?) other countries, and in this it reminds me of our health system, notoriously inefficient, famously willing to address any complaint to any level of detail. It's as if having established the main goal of the system--justice, or health (?)--no cognizance may be taken of anything that could possibly compromise that goal, no matter how intelligent the tradeoff might be. It's as if we have all the time and all the money in the world, as if nothing else matters. Magnificent in a certain light, mad in another.
- Who actually bears much of these costs is up to fortune: you may be called for a few days of DUI, you may be called for half a year or more of murder or insurance fraud or something else rather more complex. My employer, bless its heart, will cover full pay and benefits regardless of the duration, but not all will, nor are all employed, and one shudders to think of those without good childcare coverage, illness, etc. It begins to seem unworkable except, of course, that it does appear to work.
- The defendant was Hispanic. No one else was--not any of the officials, nor any of the jurors, nor even any of the other people called for selection. And yet Marin County boasts an Hispanic population of something like 15%. How can this be? Simple: in order to participate on a jury you have to be a citizen. Immigrant populations, poorer than average and therefore more likely to end up in court whatever the base rates of criminality may show, thus cannot expect to be judged by a jury of their peers. This seems fundamentally unfair, nor is there any obvious reason why a non-citizen cannot fulfill this duty just as well as a citizen.
For fuller details on the process, see
the appropriate website.
