In the jury pool for a capital trial

Photograph by W. Marsh

So a couple of weeks ago I was cutting up rather large because I had been called into the jury pool for a capital trial in my little home town. I found the whole episode very upsetting, even though my friends kept assuring me that there was no way a person as publicly and loudly against the death penalty as I would ever make the cut for this jury.

For one thing, my friends were not making the jury selection.

As it turned out, it took the Circuit Court two days to decide they wouldn’t be able to seat a jury in the town where this crime was committed and I was only involved one of those days.

Still, it was enough for me. You all may find this way over sensitive of me, but I found it upsetting to be in the room, even in a crowded room, with a man the state may very well kill, a man who sat to the left of the judge’s bench chatting with one of his lawyers as though this were just some ordinary gathering of townspeople — a school board meeting, maybe, or a high school ball game.

The whole experience was both very mundane and very nerveracking.

The judge began by telling us we were convening in the courtroom of the historic County Courthouse, the one built in 1906, because of the majesty of the building and the solemnity of the occasion.

But a mischievous little voice in my head wondered if it might just be because there were so many of us, more than might comfortably fit into the newer courtrooms in the newer Circuit Courthouse across the street.

It is true that the old county court is a majestic room, sitting as it does on the second floor of a building on a hill, under the copper-plated dome with paintings of the four seasons around its inner walls. One of those seasons shows the cutting of hemp, once a major money crop here. But it was also bloody uncomfortable for old joints, the seats wooden, the rows close together.

And there were a lot of us. I had received a letter assigning me a juror number of 410. But I thought maybe their numbering system began, like checks, at 100 or something. Then I got a letter saying that, because there were so many of us, we were asked to park at the fairgrounds and ride shuttles in to the courthouse.

We were also asked, for security’s sake, to bring nothing with us but our car keys and our drivers’ licenses.

And so we filed off the big yellow schoolbuses, up the grand staircase, and through the metal detectors into the courtroom. There was not an empty seat.

The Circuit Clerk began to call the roll, “Juror Number 1.”

The judge instructed us, swore us in, read the charges, told us the trial was predicted to last three weeks. He would begin by hearing hardship excuses — people whose job or health would prevent them serving such a long period of time. Would people with such an excuse line up along the wall to the right.

The line wound up the right-hand wall, along the back, and curved around to the left wall. And every time I thought it had begun to shrink, a few more people would get up and join the queue.

This is how we spent most of my first and only day on this jury, sitting in hard narrow wooden seats watching people file up to the bench and confer with the judge and four lawyers while the accused chatted easily with a fifth lawyer.

The judge was efficient. He took approximately three minutes per juror, and still it took him five hours to hear these excuses.

So we all learned more than we wanted to know about one another’s gall stones, carried on flirtations, texted on our cellphones. I think I may have been the only person in the room to actually heeded the instructions to leave such items at home or at the very least to turn them off.

The jurors were a cross-section of county society: a retired bank president who spend the day chatting with a patrician-looking woman from one of the old families, middle-aged women with tattoos, droop-pantsed young men and buzz-cut farmers, RNs from the local hospital and practical nurses from the local nursing home. I was intrigued by the guy in the Texas Longhorns t-shirt who kept a toothpick propped behind his right ear — when he didn’t have it in his mouth. A woman sitting to my left, a sweet-faced young woman who had just got a referral on foster parenting from the woman on her left, mutter “I don’t know why they’re even bothering to have a trial.”

Occasionally I would get up and stand looking out the window at the television satellite trucks parked on the empty street. They were not allowed to come in the courthouse and we were not allowed to go out. We were escorted to the toilet by a woman deputy.

I thought I might mug the woman in the front row who was absorbed in a drugstore paperback.

Even the longest lines finally come to an end and finally all the excuses were heard. Those of us not excused were divided by some sort of lottery system into groups of eight, instructed to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil, and given appointments over the next two days to come back for voir dire.

I never made it. The next evening, when I was at the Accents reading, I got a telephone call from the Circuit Clerk’s office. The trial would be moved to another venue and my services as a juror were no longer needed.

I would never get to find out whether the advice I got was true: that the more you talk during voir dire, the more likely you are to get thrown off the jury. It’s knowledge I can live without.

Day before yesterday, I got a very nice letter from the Circuit Judge thanking me for my “willingness to be available,” my patience, and my time. Of course, not being available without a valid excuse puts you in contempt of court, subject to a considerable fine and/or a jail term. But to mention that it is an ungracious response to a gracious gesture —or to mention the fact that judges are elected in Kentucky.

It was a gracious letter. And I was available, though neither willing nor patient.

When the judge said actual courtroom procedure has little of the fast-paced drama of a television show, he was telling a major truth.

The truth of the matter is, though, that I take this obligation of citizenship very seriously. As I might hope some day to have a public trial with an impartial jury of my peers, so I consider it my duty to serve. And I even go so far as to wonder whether citizens such as I, who do not think we have a moral right to punish with death, might have a heightened obligation to serve on juries such as this one.

Except that I didn’t really think I’d be impartial. The prospect of the death penalty would make me prejudiced.

If the accused perpetrated this heinous crime, then he should be penalized. But the death penalty is also heinous to me.

If, as I think there is, there was a possibility of life without parole I could have argued for that. But what if I had not prevailed?

Now my friends say, “Oh it was that jury.” And they shudder.

And I shudder too and feel grateful to the people of a nearby county who are actually sitting that jury.

Unlike them, I was spared any testing of my moral fiber.

I wonder if that’s a good thing.

__________

Addendum:
New Study: Ending Death Penalty Could Save States Millions

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