Jury duty

On September 12, I was selected, much to my surprise, to be a member of a jury in the District of Columbia Superior Court. One of the liabilities of living in the District is the frequency with which you are summoned to jury duty, about once every two years. It's a peril of living in a jurisdiction with a high number of criminal cases and a low number of registered voters per capita.

I served on a jury once before, about six or seven years ago, as I recall; that case took two days, and we jurors reached a quick verdict: Our foreman began deliberations by asking each of us what our tentative verdict was, and we all said guilty. We talked about it for another quarter-hour or so and then informed the judge that we had reached a verdict. Several days later, I went back to the courthouse and looked up the record in the case. In that, I found documents, which were inadmissible as evidence (the defendant had not taken the stand), of the defendant's previous convictions. I felt that I would have pressed my fellow jurors harder if I had known of these. In law school, I was dubious about the assumption that knowledge of previous convictions would influence a jury. I learned then that the assumption was true.

This trial took longer. We were in court hearing evidence for six days. But not all day: The judge spent mornings until about 11:30 considering other matters, presumably pretrial motions and the like. Sessions ended at 4:30 or shortly thereafter. So I still had time to write my columns, surf the Web, and, occasionally, blog, as well as to attend evening events. Still, jury duty obtrudes pretty sharply into your time. The judge strongly urged us to arrive on time, and we all did, except on the last day, after our deliberations already had started, when we were urged to get to court by 9:30. The lines outside the courthouse before the security checks were unusually long, and about half of us didn't make it on time. I also found it just a little irritating, a bit like being in second grade again, to have to line up in jury number order in the hallway outside the jury room before going into court.

But if serving on a jury is in some ways irritating, it can also be a learning experience, or at least it was for me. Some observations on what I learned:

I was struck by the high quality of the judge and of both the prosecutor and the defense counsel. Years ago, from 1969 to 1971, I served as a law clerk to a federal appeals court judge, and reading the transcripts of state criminal cases, as I sometimes had to do, left me feeling that the judicial process in big-city criminal courts was often pretty bad. I got a much better impression as a juror this year. The judge did a fine job, keeping firm control of the courtroom, maintaining a serious but also a friendly tone, treating counsel, jurors, and every witness with courtesy and respect. So far as I could tell, his rulings on evidentiary matters seemed correct and fair. The prosecutor and defense counsel were both well prepared and carefully professional. In their closing statements, they even rose to some level of eloquence. Defense counsel, by the way, was from the D.C. public defender's office. I couldn't understand the point of some of their questions, especially on cross-examination, but that may just be because I didn't understand the facts and the law as well as they did.

A curiosity. One of the clerks, when she swore in witnesses, ended the oath with "so help you." The other ended it with "so help you God." Does the first clerk take the position that the First Amendment prohibits the use of the word "God" in court?

I was struck also by the seriousness of my fellow jurors. We were told not to discuss the case among ourselves until we started deliberations, and we didn't. I was intensely curious to know if my fellow jurors shared my view of the case, but while the trial was on I didn't really have any idea whether they did; only when we started deliberations did it become clear that most did. Nor was there any element of racial tensions. I have heard of D.C. juries over the years in which some black jurors refuse to vote to convict, saying they don't want to send another black man to jail. There was nothing faintly like that in our deliberations. The initial jury panel, by the way, consisted of seven blacks and seven whites (the procedure evidently is to choose two at random as alternates and excuse them before deliberation; in our case, one woman was excused for some personal reason and one man was excused as the randomly selected alternate).

The final jury was six men and six women, six blacks and six whites. Some of the women were, I think, in their 30s, but most of us were older. Demographically, we came close to resembling the voter rolls in the District of Columbia, which has been experiencing rapid gentrification and the emptying-out of neighborhoods dominated by the criminal underclass. According to the 2004 exit poll, just 54 percent of District voters were black. Early on, a consensus developed that Juror No. 1 should be our foreman. She was an accountant for the Navy married to an Air Force officer, articulate and cheerful–a good choice, as it turned out.

This was a criminal case. There was no question that the defendant had stabbed the victim three times after an argument in the parking lot at the end of an hours-long party, at which almost everyone had been drinking. The issue was whether the stabbing was in self-defense. The prosecution and defense presented two different and inconsistent narratives of what had happened.

The prosecution presented the victim's best friend (he had evidently been raised with him), his girlfriend, Melissa (one of three sisters whose names I'll use to avoid confusion), and the victim himself. The victim's testimony was particularly wrenching. He was articulate, even garrulous, but he also tried to recount conversations by imitating others' tone of voice, so softly as to be incomprehensible sometimes. His anger sometimes overcame him, and he seemed to slide into something like a growl. The judge had to ask him several times to speak audibly. He was so upset at one time that the judge, on his own motion, declared a recess. Also, he stood before the jury and revealed the scars on his abdomen and chest from the stabbing. He said the stabbing occurred by a car near the entrance to the apartment where the party was held and that after the stabbing the defendant chased him around another car. That story was at least partly corroborated by the other two prosecution witnesses.

In listening to this story, I was observing a part of Washington, D.C., very different from the neighborhood I live in. The victim, age 31, had been a Navy SEAL, evidence that he was a man of strength and smarts. But his wounds had weakened him, and he walked unsteadily. And he hadn't been working regularly before the stabbing. These were people, I thought, living in a neighborhood east of the Anacostia River where the criminal underclass is a real presence. These people were living just above that underclass, unsteadily so, and always in danger of falling. And fell: The victim was now unemployable and the defendant on trial for assault with intent to kill and three lesser charges.

The defense called five witnesses. The first was Melissa, on some minor points; then her niece, who testified that Melissa had told her that the victim had been saying all the day before that he was going to go after the defendant. She testified that Melissa was her favorite aunt and then, asked about her truth and veracity, said, "My aunt is a terrible liar." The prosecutor seemed to be making an effort to keep herself from laughing out loud. Melissa's sister Karen also testified but on cross-examination kept responding, "I can't remember." She said she missed much of the action because she was looking for an earring on the ground. Then came the defendant's wife, Sonja Renee, who testified that the defendant did nothing wrong or provocative and that the victim started hitting and holding him near his car at the far end of the parking lot as he was preparing to leave the party.

She also contradicted the victim's testimony that she herself had said she did not want to leave; it was undisputed that the victim kept taunting the defendant for not dancing with his wife at the party and for saying he wanted to leave.

Then the defendant testified, in a thick Guyanese accent. He seemed to be a contentious fellow. He repeated several times how the sisters' mother kept asking if he was from Nigeria, and he said he was from South America, not Africa; and he made a point of repeatedly objecting that his interview with a police officer, which the report said occurred on August 23, actually took place on August 22. His story matched his wife's.

On the sixth day of the trial, we listened to the judge's instructions and the closing statements of the prosecutor and defense counsel. In the jury room we were provided with a text of the judge's instructions and with the evidence introduced, including the victim's shirt and undershirt, together with a pair of rubber gloves to handle them. We began by selecting Juror No. 1 as the foreman (or "foreperson," as the judge put it), and she got us launched into a discussion of the case.

One juror, who wore different colored wigs and football T-shirts to court and was missing two of her front teeth, made the point that we had never seen the knife and suggested that it was possible that the defendant used a bigger knife. I replied that it didn't make any difference, since there was no question that a stabbing had taken place. But as the discussion went on, I changed my mind and agreed with her and others that the point was worth noting.

I also made the point that the stories told by the prosecution and defense witnesses were mutually inconsistent; we would have to decide which was true, or rather whether we believed the prosecution version beyond a reasonable doubt. Then others chimed in, with views similar to my own. They tended to discount the testimony of the defense witnesses. Karen's testimony was seen as basically worthless. Sonja Renee seemed to be too scripted, and there were significant contradictions with her statement to the police officer (or to the grand jury, I can't remember which). But at least a couple of the jurors continued to consider the case in light of the defendant's story and to consider the question of whether his actions in that version constituted self-defense. I noted at one point that the defendant's testimony that he observed two white men as bystanders on the sidewalk seemed unlikely because white men were very unlikely to be in that neighborhood at that time of night. Another juror, a black man, made the point that white men did appear in such neighborhoods at that time of night, to buy drugs or to seek prostitutes. Point well taken: It's a good thing to have jurors from all segments of society. The foreman asked us to write on scraps of paper our tentative verdict on count 1, assault with intent to kill. They came in: 5 guilty, 7 not guilty. A consideration of count 2, assault with intent to harm (I forget the exact wording) didn't produce a unanimous conclusion either.

The foreman moved us to consider count 3, a simple assault charge (I'm not recalling the specifics). Here we reached, at 11:07 by my notes, a unanimous guilty verdict. We next took up count 4, felony threats, and reached a unanimous guilty verdict at 11:33. In the discussion after that, it seemed pretty clear that none of us accepted the claim of self-defense. Then we launched into discussion of count 1, assault with intent to kill (the instructions ordered us, if we voted not guilty on that, to consider a lesser included offense). In the course of this discussion, the foreman made an excellent point, which hadn't occurred to me. Karen's testimony that she was on the ground looking for an earring was implausible unless the verbal argument at the car had ended and the victim, as he testified, walked away toward the apartment. That completely undercut the defendant's version. In addition, she and others, including me, made the point that the defendant's story required us to believe that he opened a small pocketknife on a key chain while he was being pummeled and held by the collar by the victim–implausible, because it takes two hands to open such a knife. On the other hand, we tended to believe the victim's testimony and to a large extent that of his two supporting witnesses.

One reason was that the victim's testimony, unlike the defendant's, did not picture himself as behaving flawlessly: By the victim's own account, he was acting like an obnoxious jerk, frequently urging the defendant to dance with his wife and pestering him about leaving, though it was apparently after midnight (I noticed that most of the witnesses didn't wear watches) and the defendant had to go to work the next day. The momentum was building; on our scraps of paper we voted 10 to 2 for guilty on count 1. Then came an hour for lunch, when we were escorted by a guard to the cafeteria in the courthouse. One juror was visibly upset that she wasn't getting a chance to smoke.

When we returned after lunch, discussion resumed. The foreman had said that morning she wanted to get a verdict today. Around 2:55, one of the dissenting jurors made a motion with her hand and said she would change her vote. The other not-guilty voter signaled that he too had changed his vote. So now we had a unanimous verdict: guilty on all counts, at 2:59. We informed the court clerk, and court was reconvened at 3:30. In that small courtroom, you walk in directly under the gaze of the defendant and defense counsel, knowing that you have just made a decision that will surely send him to jail for a long time. It's a moment when you hope (or as one of the holdout jurors said, pray) that you have made the right decision. The defendant did not flinch as the foreman read the verdict and as each of us in juror number order said it was his or her verdict too. The judge thanked us for our service and made a note of our punctuality (evidently, many D.C. jurors are not so punctual).

The judge also said that we could talk to the lawyers in the jury room afterward. I walked out with the other jurors and then decided I had to return to talk to the lawyers. They were quite civil with each other; presumably they encounter each other in their work with some frequency. Criminal courts can be a small community. I complimented them on their work and indicated to them the view the jurors had taken of the evidence. I asked them if they expected to win. The prosecutor said she had and that she was struck by the victim's testimony and believed he was sincere and truthful. Defense counsel said that he thought he had a strong self-defense claim. I think that would have been true if the testimony of Karen and Sonja Renee had been more credible. I ended by remarking that we were witnesses to a tragedy that shattered two human lives and severely disrupted several others.

"Most cases we get are like that," one of the lawyers said.