Jury Duty
The beauty and tedium of a functioning democracy.
I managed to get one postponement last fall, so when a jury summons arrived for April 1, I prepared myself. There was no escape. Jury duty would be happening.
Perhaps, I hoped, I’d get picked for a simple civil case, like the last time I’d served on a jury in Manhattan, sometime in the 80s. A woman was suing Dannon yogurt company for injuries sustained when a delivery person hit her leg with a delivery cart. Back then, during all the waiting around for lawyers to pick or not pick jurors, there was no iPhone to while away the time playing Wordle and Spelling Bee or checking work emails, because there was no email. Once our jury was seated, the case lasted a few days. I recall that among my group was an editor at The New York Times, a retired librarian, and someone who worked for the MTA. We represented a true socio-economic cross-section of the city. I bonded with a few jurors, enough that we lunched together in Chinatown, walking distance from the court buildings. The plaintiff’s request for multimillions in compensation for “pain and suffering” was, in our jury’s collective opinion, excessive. It turned out that the company had already offered her a generous settlement that she had unwisely rejected. However unworthy the case, the process itself was a revelation. We took our job seriously, we heard and evaluated testimony, and the system worked. I was proud to be part of this exceptional feature of our democracy: a tedious trial by a jury of fellow citizens.
A few days before I was to appear at the county courthouse, Clark bought a copy of our local paper. On the front page was a story about a man who’d just been indicted for kidnapping and attempted murder of a former girlfriend. Jury selection would begin on April 1. I would be in this jury pool. There was no escape.
When I arrived at the courthouse at 9am, there were over a hundred of us and once again it pleased me to see a representative mix of our community. We were ushered into the grand courtroom. High ceilings, lots of gilding and decorative filigree woodwork, grandiose paintings of long-ago white male judges.
On each chair was a folder containing a questionnaire. At the top was a description of the case and the charges in the indictment. This was the one I’d read about in the local paper. At the bottom of the form was a list of questions, one of which—if I answered honestly—would exclude me from this and possibly any future criminal jury.
Have you been the victim of a crime?
Well, yes. Let me count the times.
I grew up in Manhattan. I am a smallish person and a woman and therefore, given the ways of our culture, a target. I know I’m not alone as a statistic.
An incomplete list:
When I was about 15, I was waiting at a city bus stop one school day afternoon, when a guy grabbed my tits, right there, in broad daylight. Fortunately, he was pulled away by passersby. I was wearing my horrid school uniform: white button-down shirt, blue pleated skirt, blue cardigan, blue knee socks, brown penny loafers. I was at an awkward age, when my tits were new and I was not enjoying them. In that moment they became a liability. I asked myself what I had done to deserve this violation. I started wearing oversized sweaters and permanently borrowed one of my dad’s old tweed jackets. I felt safest hidden in lumpy knits and tweed. This made the sweltering summers of New York City a challenge. Look around, and you’ll see plenty of teenage girls who’ve adopted Billie Eilish’s oversized fashion choices as a means of selfcare. This aesthetic of voluminous tops and trousers is having quite a moment. Back then, it just further marked me as a weirdo.
Post-college, in the mid 80s, I was employed as a junior designer at a publishing company in Midtown Manhattan. I often left my office with just my wallet in hand to go buy a sandwich at a nearby deli. I liked the wallet. It fit well in my hand and was Pantone Bright Red C—a good color, because hard to misplace. I reached the middle of Fifth Avenue when a man walked towards me and grabbed the red wallet right out of my hand. He wheeled around, and I chased him across the avenue, screaming at other lunchtime pedestrians to stop him. They did. A cop showed up and grabbed the guy. I was so fueled with adrenalin and rage that I started beating on the thief’s chest with my fists, not realizing that he was handcuffed, which was a good thing. The cop let me wail away for a bit before leading the man away. Soon after, I bought a new wallet, black, which matched 99% of my clothing and therefore would be well camouflaged. I misplaced it often.
Then there was an assault and robbery near Astor Place following a showing of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” I was with my then boyfriend and another female friend when a bunch of kids surrounded us on Lafayette Street and one of them—who looked to be about ten—hit me in the head with a wooden dowel. I saw stars, like a character in a Loony Tunes cartoon, but thanks again to adrenalin and maybe a thick skull, I ran after the kid who’d grabbed my handbag, screaming at the top of my lungs. I don’t think this kid thief was expecting a full-on chase scene. I found my bag in a trash can, heard sirens, and ran back to join my boyfriend and our friend. By this time, cops had rounded up the thieves. I felt a wetness on my head and realized I was bleeding where the wooden stick had connected with my head. We ended the night at an emergency room. If I feel around, I can still locate the tiny scar on my scalp where the doctor stapled the wound. This made a good Lynchian New York story to tell at parties.
One lazy Saturday afternoon, I was at the same boyfriend’s apartment in the East Village. This was still the 80s, when glass crack vials littered the neighborhood’s sidewalks, crunching underfoot like fragile sea shells. I always took a taxi from the 14th Street subway to his apartment building at 2nd Street and Avenue B and made the driver wait until I was safely inside. We were having sex in his narrow twin bed (the only size that fit in his cubbyhole of a bedroom), but were startled from our bliss by a loud scraping and crunching in the so-called living room. A guy was on the fire escape, prying the locked window open with a crowbar. I shrieked, the robber bolted. I called 911 while wrapped in a bedsheet, and my boyfriend (men are really quite dumb when they try to be superheroes) insisted on hastily dressing and chasing the guy, who was, of course, long gone. My boyfriend and his roommate ordered steel gates for the windows that their landlord should have installed earlier.
Worst of all was a sexual assault that had happened years earlier, but remains part of me at a cellular level. I recovered to live my life, for which I am grateful, but I lost a sense of trust. Given the nature of the present case, I knew that this event, most of all, would disqualify me from serving on the jury.
A court officer collected our questionnaires and then we watched a video, narrated by the New York State Chief Justice. He spoke with urgency and sincerity about the importance of jury service. Then a woman psychologist who studies juries explained how our brains form biases and how to become more self-aware, so that we can listen with open minds. I wanted to prove that even as a victim of multiple crimes, I could clear my own mind of everything in my past and treat the defendant as an individual. My heart welled up with what I can only describe as patriotic emotion, despite the dire situation of our present moment. In too many countries, any defendant would be presumed guilty, his or her fate determined by a judge, or a facsimile of one. But that morning in a county courthouse, a man who may have done terrible things to another human would get his day in court. A lawyer paid by the state would represent him and twelve ordinary people would determine his guilt or innocence. We know that the system isn’t perfect. Too often it has failed, with devastating results. But it can work. The presumption of innocence is one of the best ideas in our Constitution, right up there with the separation of church and state.
After the video finished, we waited around some more. I reached “Nice” in Spelling Bee. The court officer apologized for the delay, and explained that the lawyers were still talking to the judge. It was nearly lunchtime and my stomach growled in anticipation. I got up to stretch my legs and looked out one of the tall windows into the small park that faced the courthouse. I recalled the countless times when, as a passerby, I’d looked up at bored and hungry people waiting around to be chosen or not chosen.
Finally, the court officer announced that some of us would be excused from service. As I expected, my name was called. My jury duty was over. I noted, sadly, that most of the other people who were excused were women.
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As before, I especially enjoy and learn from the connections you make between the different parts of our lives, and give them a new perspective and meaning.
I love jury duty. Everyone hates the idea of it but once having gone through a trial you realize how fascinating the whole thing is and how you feel like the most important and privileged part of the process