Saturday, April 30, 2005
Full Court Press
Before today, I would never have said that ‘intensely exciting’ and ‘mind-numbingly dull’ could be used to describe the same event. That was before the Jury. Now that I have completed my civic duty, I can say that serving on a jury is one of the most interesting and rewarding experiences one can have – just make darn sure your case has some level of interest. If it does not, take your pleasure in those moments (few and far between, but they are there), in which the trial begins to remotely resemble Law and Order.
To paraphrase the Mad Hatter, I think it would be best that I begin at the beginning, and when I come to the end, stop. In order to maintain some anonymity for my fellow jurors and the court, I’ve elected to omit names – they know who they are.
Monday
Jury selection begins. Several hundreds of us are crowded into a room, led by a man with the type of handlebar mustache that only Sam Elliott, Tom Selleck, or Kit Carson, can really pull off. As if to completely round out the caricature, he speaks in an easy-going drawl that moseys from his lips. He introduces us to the Jury video, a wonderfully made piece of film that reminds me of every employee training video I was ever forced to sit through. I feel it really needs an introduction from Troy McClure to be complete (“You might remember me from such Legal films as ‘Hanging Judge, Hung Jury’ and ‘Habeas Corpus and Us’).
The video is followed with what promises to be just one of many exciting hour-to-hour-and-a-half hours breaks. Many have brought books and other reading materials to get them through it. Newspapers. Thrifty Nickels. Phone Books. I sit there, having found myself for once without readily available entertainment. For the first time, but certainly not the last, I hear Blondie in my head: “Hurry up. Hurry up, and wait.”
The Judge comes in, swears us in, and then proceeds to hear excuses on why individuals cannot serve. Roughly one third of the jurors of dismissed. Those that are left are split into groups and taken to our respective courtrooms. Whereas the other groups seem to enter their courts readily, we are left in the hall to admire how our 1-cent sales tax (collected to the tune of 25 or so million dollars) was used to coat our Halls of Justice in gleaming marble. I am astonished at the number of celebrity look-a-likes in my jury pool. One bears a strong resemblance to James Woods, another to Randy Jackson. Yet another is a clone of George Lucas– the curled coif, the rotund girth, the salt-and-pepper beard. It was uncanny.
Legal wheeling and dealings leave us in the halls for nearly an hour before the bailiff tells us to go to lunch for about an hour and a half. I go to lunch with same fellow jurors, and then we go to the library for reading materials. On the recommendation of one of my companions, I pick up two fantasy novels. I also pick up a Tad Williams novel, whose girth is only slightly exceeded by Rhode Island. I figure these will do me well in the upcoming hours.
We return to the courthouse, and my companion, a teacher, tells me some true horror stories about the current state of education in Florida. After another hour, we are taken inside for interviews with the lawyers. At this point we are informed this trials is expected to last five days, at which point numerous jurors find new and suddenly remembered reasons why they cannot serve. Some are quite inventive. I especially like the man formerly convicted of transporting 20 tons of marijuana. His rights have been fully restored, yet he thinks the justice system is full of injustice. I make a mental note he is able to walk around a free man, and I myself would find that very fair, considering.
The podium at which the lawyers stand to ask the jury questions sits directly between the defendant and us. Comically, when the lawyers ask specific jurors questions, it becomes obvious the defendant can’t see the juror either. In order to do, he pushes his wheeled chair down the length of the table. The sight of him slowly rolling into view and leaning to see the jurors makes me want to laugh, but I manage to keep a poker face.
At this point, I recognize the defendant as a local businessman who I have seen on television advertising his business. It lends a level of excitability to the trial. After all – I have seen him on television, which makes him a pseudo-celebrity. Awesome stuff.
I’m not sure I could be disqualified for recognizing him. A juror farther down reveals the fact she knows who he is, and mentions his profession. The lawyers scramble for a second, and for a moment I think we are going to be e all dismissed. But it does not happen.
The selection process is rather quick. I am surprised to see that several jurors who I would have thought would have been excused based on their answers, and past experiences with similar crimes, are selected to serve. My library companions are not. We are directed to come back the next day to begin the trial.
Tuesday
The trial begins. The State begins by recounting a scam perpetrated by their chief witness, who used a company credit card to make illicit purchases and then sell them to the defendant, a pawnbroker. The State maintained the pawnbroker should know the pawns were illegal as they were new in the box. The defense attorney reminds us that there are ‘two sides to every pancake’, stresses he is not Perry Mason, and that there is more than ample case for reasonable doubt. The case begins.
The first day is spent establishing the paper evidence for this case. There is a lot of paper evidence. 24 store receipts. 28 or so pawn receipts. All in all, the exhibits, run from exhibit A to exhibit ZZ. Not to mention exhibits 1-8. Later, all of these exhibits get renumbered to become exhibits 1 through 54, right before our very eyes, in a process just slightly faster than watching paint dry. I expect at any moment one of the lawyers will introduce Exhibit Q – A scale model of the entire mall!
Each piece of evidence has to enter as evidence by being authenticated by a witness. This takes two defense witnesses, and the entire day of testimony. Both testimonies and filled with numerous objections, some of which are resolved with us in court, and others that require us to wait in the deliberation room. After our lunch of General Tso’s chicken, the tedium of going through each piece of evidence is evident on all of our faces, including our fight to keep sleep at arm’s length. I know the defendant can see it too, and wonder how he fees, looking at the jurors who will determine his fate, drowsy, or happy, or bored. It must take a toll.
The courtroom is spacious and tastefully decorated in dark wood paneling and sound-absorbing carpet. This really helps to accentuate the rooms’ inability to help anyone’s voice project. The lawyers ask witnesses to speak up. The witnesses ask lawyers to repeat their questions. The judge asks witnesses to speak up. The court reporter asks everyone to speak up. There is a generous sprinkling of microphones throughout the room, but none of them seem to actually work. There is a white noise generator to shield the judge and lawyer conversations at sidebar, but this white noise is apparently so loud that the participants in the hush-hush conversation can barely hear one another. The court reporter has to situate herself between the lawyers and strain to hear their conversation. The comical wedge of four people trying to occupy the same space at the same time is something all television legal shows seem to gloss over.
Our judge is fair. She always has a perpetual smile, as if she is privy to some warm and cuddly secret, or has a bemused feeling towards the whole case. Once, when we are being led to the court vending room during a break, we run into her as she is leaving the court chambers. Having seen the thunderstorm outside, she exclaims giddily “Oh, look! It’s raining!” Seeing us, her bright smile quickly reverts to her courtroom composure, but I’ll always remember that moment where she reminds me exactly of Judy Garland or Shirley Temple.
I get to learn some of the quirks of my fellow jurors. One lives his life just like Lazlo from Real Genius. Oh, he isn’t under a dormitory, but he spends nearly every spare minute writing in to game contests. And, just like Lazlo, it pays off. Maybe not 33.3% of the time, but he has one a truck, vacations, cash prizes, a college scholarship, and about a dozen tickets to the Superbowl. Over the next few days I’ll have several opportunities to watch him in action, as envelope after envelope after card after card flies out from under his deft scribbling. The nursery owner gives me some great tips on how to hide the unseemly chain link fence in my back yard.
I finish my first book halfway through the day.
Wednesday
The prosecution brings to the stand their key witness. Again, he reiterates his list of crimes, and how the pawnbroker was involved. He is followed by testimony from several other pawnbrokers, who are questioned about whether they would be suspicious of taking items in the box. Strangely, none of these witnesses really bolster the prosecution’s case. One of them rather neatly torpedoed the case by stating he takes ‘truckloads of items new in the box’. Only one of the brokers seems to actively agree with the state, but on cross- examination, he reveals he takes new items too. Even more damaging, when confronted with his deposition for the case, he admits he hates the defendant, and that he can ‘expound on that if necessary’. The State rests, and we go to lunch.
When we return, the defense begins their case by giving us testimony by teleconference, with a woman I recognize from the defendant’s commercial. She’s testifying from Tampa, and reiterates that the defendant followed the laws that govern pawnbroker transactions. The video feed is poor, and her testimony reminds me of a Kung-Fu import on light night television.
She is followed up with several other pawnbrokers, a police lieutenant, and the defendant’s previous lawyer, who all testify as to the legal advice that had been given or had received regarding pawnbroker laws. Each is met with the customary requisite number of objectives, sidebars, and private conversations. The state grills each with hypotheticals, which really aren’t all that hypothetical, and recount each of the 24 counts, over and over. I become intimately familiar with how the defendant feet really stand far apart when he is sitting down, how the microphones on one side of the court are a different than the other, and how the rope effect on the Great Seal of Florida has been rendered incorrectly on the wall of the court. Hey, I’m in graphic design – my eyes tend to get drawn to things like that.
A defense witness is late, and the court is thrown for a tizzy on whether the order of witnesses can be changed. We’re sent back tot he deliberation room. As we are approaching the door to leave, the unmistakably pedestrian sound of a doorbell echoes through the room. Everyone stops, including the bailiff, who apparently has not heard this noise in court before. After a second or two of silence, the judge asks, “Expecting anybody”? Everyone laughs.
We return to court to hear testimony from the defendant. We walks us through the evidence and paperwork we have seen time and time again before, and he tells us how in the past he has informed and cooperated with the police and the State in prosecuting thieves and murderers. When the State redirects, we reached perhaps the most Hollywood moment of the trial – sadly sans loud gavel banging or dramatic music buildup. In n attempt to cast the defendant in a bad light in our minds, the prosecutor stated the reason he is called it to testify for so many cases is due to the amount of stolen property than flows through his store. She brought up the Looney murder case, in which the “Live Mister Looney” (honestly, this is how they were named in the exchange) tried to pawn the “Dead Mister Looney’s” Personal possessions using his dead brother’s driver’s license. Rather than answering directly, the defendant hemmed and hawed, which prompted an “Answer the question, yes or no?” This went back and forth several times, and the judge finally ordered him to answer Yes or No, which finally resulted in an exasperated “Yes”. I very much wanted to stand up and whoop and applaud, but realized prudently that such a reaction would probably be defined by the Court as ‘Contempt’.
This concluded the second day of the trial.
Thursday
As in the days before, the day began with thirty-forty minutes of legal stuff behind closed doors. We then heard from several witnesses bolstering the defense’s points from the day before, despite numerous Objections from the State. I’m proud of myself for catching a comment from one of the witnesses that proves he was coached ahead of his testimony, when he states a fact of the case on the stand prior to it being mentioned by either lawyer. Finally the Defense rested, and after rebuttal from the State’s key witness, we were sent to lunch early as the Defense decided to enter a motion. I imagine it was a motion to dismiss the case in its entirety. We were told then at 11:30 we would come back to court at 1.
We went to lunch and came back to the deliberation room. I finished my second book and began tackling the Tad Williams novel. I joked that if I finished this one, we were in real trouble.
At four o-clock and 300 pages into the novel, I apologized for my seemingly prophetical joke.
Thankfully, before the lynch mob could be properly outfitted with torches and pitchforks, the bailiff took us back to court. The judge then offered us two options – either to hear closing arguments and deliberate tonight, or come back in the morning. We unanimously elected to press forward.
The state presents their argument again. Curiously, it appears to me that the state prosecutor introduces the key thrust of her case in the closing, a statement in the law against fencing that states an individual can be tried for trafficking in stolen goods if they “Should have known” the goods were stolen. It is the first time I believe I’ve actually heard this statue read in court, having only heard the pawnbrokers’ statute, ad nauseum. She attempts to create some tension by stating the defendant’s bad legal advice all come from “a dead lawyer, a dead cop, and a lawyer who shares office space with the defense attorney”. It’s a clever attempt of obfuscation, but it doesn’t really fly.
The defense attorney begins by calling our attention back to the two-sided pancake. He then began a twenty-minute recitation of the facts in evidence and how the state’s key witness either lied or could not remember a majority of them. Following this litany, he then made a statement worthy of Ben Matlock:
”When you’re eating stew, and you find a piece of rotten meat, do you throw that piece of meat out and keep on eating? No! You throw the whole stew out. And I submit to you, there is more than one piece of rotten meat in [witness’] testimony.”
It’s corny when you read it/. In retrospect, it’s corny when it is heard. In the moment, however, it was one hundred percent effective.
The judge then sent us out for a few minutes, and then dismissed the two alternates and read us our jury instructions. We returned to the deliberation room for the final time.
The juror I knew would be elected foreman was asked to serve in that capacity. When he declined, I rapidly accepted, visions of being able to stand in court and read the verdict dancing in my head. We took our secret vote, and read the results one at a time (I provided the requisite Survivor joke at this point). We all had come to the same conclusion, but decided that going back immediately into the court would be bad form, and so elected to discuss the case more thoroughly and our impressions of the whole affair. That I’m not going to share – what happens in the deliberation room, stays in the deliberation room. Let’s suffice to say the air conditioning was working fine, and George C. Scott was not present.
All right, I’m getting to it! You can’t rush to the punch line, you know?
We reentered court. Depressingly, the bailiff took my verdict form and took it to the court clerk to read aloud. Not nearly as dramatic. Still, the defendant did cry after the result was read – not guilty on all 24 counts.
Surreally, the next few minutes were taken up by jurors getting notes to take to work to prove they were at court all week. It was a strange piece of routine and pedestrian bureaucracy that ultimately capped the otherworldly experience that is the Jury.
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