We were the few, the proud, the mutinous. We were jurors in D.C. Superior Court, and as we finished up Week Three in a trial that the judge had said would last "three or four days," we rebelled.
We lined up to tell Judge John Bayly about business trips, child care woes and other such realities of life outside the courthouse. Our request was simple enough: We just wanted to put in a full day's work.
For weeks, the court had seemed cavalier about wasting our time, hearing testimony for two or three hours a day, refusing to meet on Fridays, taking two-hour lunches.
The judge explained that he had "many other cases" to deal with and that there were "legal complications" far too complex to share with mere jurors and, my, oh, my, there was a flake of snow outside and we'd better quit a few hours early. Cancel your trips, deal with your child care issues and come back next week, he told us.
Our case was an important one, involving the leader of one of the District's most violent Salvadoran youth gangs. But the court never seemed to take us as seriously as we took the trial.
From the start, we were viewed more as the embodiment of racial stereotypes than as individuals prepared to do our duty. Fourteen of us (12 jurors and two alternates) were seated in the jury box initially. The fact that there were eight white men among us did not sit well with the defense lawyers. They used their peremptory strikes to pluck off six white men and replace them with black women. The profiling -- illegal, yet commonplace -- was so obvious that at one point, when a white man in the jury pool was next in line to be considered for a spot on the panel, he looked down his row, saw a black woman three chairs away and said in a stage whisper, "You're next!" Sure enough, the defense worked its way there and put her on the jury.
It's hard for judges to police such cynical (and, in our case, incorrect) stereotyping about which groups are inclined toward prosecution or defense arguments. Gregory Mize, a retired Superior Court judge who studies jury reform for the National Center for State Courts in Arlington, says "it's terribly difficult to enforce" rules against profiling. "A good lawyer can believably say, 'Yeah, my client doesn't like how that person looked at him.' "
The glacial pace of our case -- on good days, we heard testimony from about 11 a.m. to noon and then from 2:30 to 4:30 -- was slower than most, court officials told me. Bayly wouldn't talk about our case, but other judges said a more typical day in trial lasts almost twice as long, with sessions from 10 to noon and from 1:30 to 5.
"The height of a judge's art is to be able to listen fast," says Chief Judge Rufus King III. But "it's more important that a judge listen well than that he listen fast." King wants jurors to feel their time is valued. He has embraced a new national effort to restore respect for juries. Casual attitudes toward jurors' time are so pervasive that the American Bar Association next month will consider asking judges to "impose and enforce reasonable time limits on the trial" and give jury trials "precedence over all other court proceedings." Such changes might have cut our trial from nine days to three.
The District is better than many other places about finding and caring for jurors. Rather than rely solely on driver's licenses or voting rolls, the city also culls names from tax rolls, welfare lists and the roster of new citizens.
Still, in 2003, D.C. courts sent out 318,111 summonses to jury duty, and only 44,452 people showed up to serve. Filter out bad addresses and noncitizens and still the juror yield is an appalling 29 percent.
That needn't be. The folks I got to know in Jury Room 116 were pleasant, serious, fascinating. We did our job well, and we put away a very bad guy. If the trial had run more smoothly, we'd be glad to serve again.
One more thing. I hit the lawyers for using race to divide us, but I'd be less than fair if I didn't add this: For three weeks, our jury of seven blacks and five whites got along swimmingly. Then on our last day, when we were required to eat lunch together because we were deliberating, we filed into the jurors' dining room and divided by race. I'm sorry to say that we reflected our city only too well.
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