The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Trial notes: I’ve always liked to cover trials’ jury selection. It’s the most immediate, at times too intimate window into a cross-section of our community. “You’re going to be amazed at some of the qualifications and experience of your fellow jurors,” Circuit Judge Terence Perkins told the pool of 50 at the most recent trial: CEOs, bus drivers, military, physicians, lawyers, paralegals, a couple of unemployed, pharmacists, pharmacist technicians, quality engineers, teachers, truck drivers, retired. It shouldn’t be surprising: any cross-section of voters would produce a similar list. It’s unfortunate that unregistered voters aren’t represented. Or do they do it by driver’s license now? The number of people charged or arrested, or people who have family members who were arrested, can be significant, too: pot, child abuse, aggravated robbery (someone’s son), sexual abuse. DUI, DUI, DUI. Again, nothing unusual about this. “Both my brothers got arrested probably 10 times,” one juror said, describing how one of his brothers for DUI charges over and over, and the other beat the crap out of his abusive father (he was abusing his mother). I imagine any jury selection anywhere in the world at any time in history would not be much different. “My brother beat the crap out of this Viking brute who was bullying my mother.” That sort of thing, though chances are that any Viking would’ve had the better of anyone trying to be so honorable before it ever got to court. Voir dire, the old French term applied to jury selection, is a derivative of “to tell the truth,” or something to that effect, although the words alone are literally translated differently: voir is to see, dire is to tell. As in: Living to Tell the Tale, the title Gabriel Garcia Marquez chose  for his wonderful autobiography from 2002. Inevitably, too, now that I’ve been in this county for a quarter century, there’s almost always someone I know in the pool, but they rarely make it to the final selection: people I know tend to be opinionated. Through it all, the defendant, about whom all this is, generally sits back,  mute, like his own endless sidebar until the verdict, or until he takes the stand (there’s only been two her in all this time: Anna Pehota and Dorothy Singer. Both killed their husband.) So jury selection is really a fascinating and disillusioning look into the ordinariness or the unordinary: every juror a universe of their own, distinct and individual, especially to that juror, every juror a star, though if you were to pull back, what you’d see is one star among trillions, none so distinguishable as we might want to imagine, except, of course, in its close-up particulars, though even then, the astronomers will tell us, all these stars in the end can be categorized by the same distinctions: our differences only go so far. But they’re enough. Jury selection: our peers, unless the selection is over with. By then of course they’re barely peers of the accused. The whole point of selection is to make the jury have as little in common with the accused as possible. Especially when skin color is a factor. 

—P.T.

 

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In the end, what is at stake is whether we want jurors to understand their task primarily in terms of deliberation or representation. I have argued that the deliberative ideal is preferred for the jury. Jurors recruited randomly from different corners of the community may never be able to practice perfectly the deliberations we ask of them. But we know at least why we cherish the jury when it aspires to act as the common conscience of the community and not just as the register of our irreconcilable divisions.

–From Jeffrey Abramson’s We, the Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy (1994).

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