Justice, and Only Justice, You Shall Pursue
When a state judge welcomed a jury pool recently, she mentioned a traffic stop she witnessed during a trip to Germany. That traffic stop showed the police acting as judge, jury, and executioner, seizing a drunken driver’s vehicle on the spot. In the United States, the system assumes a person accused of a crime is innocent until found guilty by a jury of peers. This makes America’s legal system “the envy of the world,” she said. I know: John Mortimer’s beloved defense attorney, Horace Rumpole, would invoke the United Kingdom’s Golden Thread as a predecessor.
I landed on a jury in a double murder trial during the week of October 28. A few fellow jurors quoted our judge’s remarks ruefully as we worked through many hours of frequent objections and legal wrangling between prosecution and defense attorneys.
I approached this week of jury duty with a keen desire to serve. I had been on only one jury before, in a civil trial in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, during the mid-1980s. That trial ended unhappily for the plaintiff when he was denied any damages for what he suffered after an auto accident. A largely unfamiliar law said he should have moved his vehicle off the road, rather than standing by his car, which led to a second collision and his devastating injuries.
I sought a better experience of justice. I hoped my service would not involve a murder trial, but this was the only trial available for the week. I submitted to circumstance and prayed for God’s guidance.
The trial involved two defendants—I’ll call them Primus and Secundus—who were accused of killing two men in their home, where they sold marijuana. One victim, the prosecution told us, would only allow people to enter his home if he knew them.
Primus was represented by two public defenders. Secundus was represented by a longtime attorney in private practice.
The state’s case relied on circumstantial evidence. One other man, Tertius, was in the home as the two men were shot to death. He was napping in a bedroom with his baby son when the shooting began, and he remained hidden.
The state’s two prosecutors carefully built their case from this circumstantial evidence. They called about a dozen people to tell what they knew about Primus. The attorney for Secundus pointed out each time the testimony did not mention her client, which was often.
The prosecutors showed us a security video from across the street, plus crime-scene photos, including black-and-white images of the dead men. When the lead prosecutor showed one such image on a screen, an older woman cried out in shock and grief, and we were sent from the courtroom again.
Tertius gave the most dramatic testimony. A pair of defense attorneys had depicted him as such a thug that I almost expected hip-hop to play as he entered the courtroom. Once he was done with his testimony, I decided that music should have been Ice Cube’s “You Picked the Wrong [Person] to [Mess] With.” (I have softened Ice Cube’s language for anyone unaccustomed to hip-hop.)
Tertius was best friends with the two men who died, and he lived with them. When the prosecution asked how many shots he heard, he recalled only a few, saying he was more focused on protecting his son than on counting. When a defense attorney questioned his choice to flee the scene before police arrived, he responded angrily: “I was protecting my son. If you were a father, you would do the same.”
After many days of emotionally flat testimony, Tertius gave us a moment of unguarded passion. This made him, to my mind, the most sympathetic and genuine witness. While so many other witnesses seemed wary of saying the wrong thing, and focused on protecting themselves, he felt patronized and responded with indignation.
Defense attorneys failed to make the case against this supposed alternative killer, other than observing that he took the time to collect a gun and his share of marijuana before fleeing the scene. One attorney observed that seven different people walked into and out of the trailer that contained two fresh corpses, usually to grab more pot and cash. It was a chilling picture of multiple people treating two newly dead bodies with no dignity or even a sense of taboo. I imagined some of these visitors stepping over the two corpses to reach their bounty.
The state’s case was weakened by police officers’ inattention to some evidence. Police collected fingerprints, but those fingerprints have since disappeared. They collected DNA in the home, but failed to have it analyzed. Nobody offered a good explanation for these failures, but they struck me as less crucial than failing to inform an accused person of his right to remain silent, or searching a property without a warrant.
In any case, the state made a persuasive argument that Primus was at the scene and was the last person to see his two fellow drug dealers alive. It relied on footage from the security camera across the street. The courtroom was entirely silent as this footage played. The foreground footage showed wind blowing the leaves and moss on trees, even as it was clear that something awful had occurred inside the home. It was a haunting contrast.
The state’s case against Secundus seemed like an afterthought. It relied on the testimony of one police officer who evaluated a video, captured a few hours before the shootings, that showed the first defendant and a few other young men loitering outside a convenience store and then breaking into it. The officer thought Secundus was one of the young men who walked into the store, but he could only see the back of the man’s head. “In my heart of hearts, I believe that is [Secundus],” he said at the end, after hedging this identification multiple other times.
The jury spent about seven hours in deliberation. We were quick to agree that Primus was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. We returned to the courtroom once to declare his guilt, and he was handcuffed and escorted out of the courtroom. One juror said he heard this man tell his mother he loved her, and another family member said, “This isn’t over.”
We were divided about whether Secundus was involved at all. Four of us repeatedly said we could not find him guilty with a clear conscience. At one point we sent the judge a note, asking if we qualified as a hung jury. She urged that we persist in resolving our differences.
We returned to the courtroom two other times to listen again to the recorded testimony of the officer who thought he saw the man walking into the store behind the man we had just convicted.
After Primus left the courtroom, Secundus and his attorney moved to the front desk for defense teams, and that made all the difference. When we returned for our second time of hearing the officer’s recorded testimony, some jurors noticed a crucial detail: Secundus was clearly thinner and shorter than the man in the prosecution’s video.
We returned to the jury room, and within minutes we agreed that the state failed to prove that the second defendant accompanied his friend to the crime scene that day. Back in the courtroom, as a clerk read our verdict aloud, Secundus and his attorney held hands tightly. His attorney wiped tears from her eyes, they shared a long hug, and he looked over at each juror with a kindly face as we each gave a twofold verbal assent to the written verdict. Some of us on the jury agreed that we would pray for him in the weeks and months ahead.
I left the courthouse feeling light and grateful. Our jury worked hard to bring justice to this case, both in pronouncing guilt and in pronouncing innocence. Even those who had groused about the tedium of reaching this moment said they were glad that we stuck with the task and came to unanimous agreement on these two life-changing verdicts.
The musician Bruce Cockburn once wrote that “everybody loves to see justice done—on somebody else.” I found through this jury duty that justice also has a kinder face.