Wednesday, May 22, 2024

When the jury takes over ...

Philip Bump creates data journalism -- charts and graphs -- for the Washington Post. But some years ago, he served on a jury in a complicated criminal case which involved many legal curlicues. He has thooughts for court watchers who think they know what the jury in Trump's hush money/election interference trial are about to do.
Our experience of what has happened and what it means is fundamentally different than the experience of the people who will ultimately decide Trump’s fate: the jury. With the defense wrapping up its case Tuesday, it’s a good moment to remember that what the jury has seen and what it is contemplating is very, very different than what you or I have seen or what we contemplate from the outside.
Put another way: Forget what you think you know about what will happen next. ...
Allow me to establish some credentials on this topic. In spring 2009, I was called for jury duty in New York City. .... For months, we heard testimony from witnesses called by the prosecution...
A lot of our time — perhaps half of it — was spent not in the courtroom but the jury room, down a short hallway from where the case was tried. It was dominated by a large table around which we sat while waiting to be called back to the jury box — or, on some occasions, to be released for the day. It was often boring. One day, we all hid in the adjacent restrooms when we knew the bailiff was coming to get us; he was understandably surprised to find the jury room empty when he arrived.
We understood that we were waiting for some legal issue to be adjudicated but, crucially, we didn’t know then and never learned what those issues were. The lawyers and the judge were discussing what evidence might be allowed or the constraints of a witness’s testimony, debates that would make it into media coverage of the trial. But we weren’t privy to any of it. Our experience of the case and the broader situation was constrained by what we saw in the courtroom. ...
... we were given instructions about reaching a verdict. Our task was not simply to determine whether [defendants] had committed a crime. It was, instead, to figure out whether they had committed the specific crimes for which they were indicted, crimes with specific criteria that established their commission. If there was any reasonable way to conclude that the defendants hadn’t met those criteria, then they were innocent. If not: guilty.
... When we walked into the jury room to begin our deliberations, I did not expect it to take long. To me, the criteria had clearly been met in some regards and clearly not in others. I naively assumed everyone had reached the same conclusions. Obviously, they had not. It took us 11 days to finalize our verdicts on the various counts at issue...
Over the course of those 11 days, we deliberated. We took occasional votes to finalize our consensus on certain charges but spent most of the time making our cases to one another. We needed unanimity, as you probably know, but not every juror responded to the evidence or the arguments in the same way. So we had to figure out how to reach consensus with that additional boundary.
... We treated the task seriously and engaged in it earnestly. And no one — ourselves included — could have predicted how the evidence and the law and the deliberations would combine for the specific outcome we reached.
... I would caution people, based on my own experience, to remember that their experience from the outside is as different than the jury’s as the courtroom sketches are from the reality of being there in person. ...
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Juries interest me. They are the most intimate exercise of democracy in which we are likely to participate. A surprisingly high fraction of us have sat in a jury box. A recent survey found that about "one in ten Americans have served on a jury in the last 10 years." Not as many as have voted, but an awful lot. And for many of us, a more emotionally and intellectually demanding activity than casting a ballot. 

Since any particular experience may range from satisfying to frustrating to confusing, it's hard to generalize about what jury service means. When the little jury notice postcard arrives from a court, most of us recoil -- such an interruption of our lives. But that juries are constituted and serve at all remains something of a civic miracle.

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