Jury Duty

In October 2011 I received a form in the mail calling me to my civic responsibility, jury duty. I was upset. I was leaving for a conference in Hawaii in a couple weeks, and what if I ended up on a trial that lasted a month or even longer? I decided it was best to postpone jury duty, and I was extremely lucky that the postponement took me to a week after getting home from Kenya, because I had already bought my plane tickets. So, I was scheduled for jury duty for April 23rd.

After struggling through a bit of traffic at the bottom of the Skyway in Buffalo, I parked in the garage across from the courthouse and went through a long line in security. In the jury assembly room, there were supposed to be exactly 550 people waiting, nervously, to be called. I got about two pages into my book when I heard my name on the loudspeaker. Eighty of us lined up in doubles and were marched to a courtroom where we learned what our sentence would be.

The judge was very pleasant, but I could feel the hope leave the room when we learned we were to be prospective jurors on a case trying Dr. James Corasanti for vehicular manslaughter. The case was expected to last at least a month and had been all over the news since the incident in July 2011. Since I am never home, I had not even heard of the guy, which probably made me a pretty good candidate for juror. But I have a job starting on May 21, what was I going to do?! Immediately, I started to think of excuses.

First excuse up, after being in Kenya, how can I trust any authority? In Kenya, police officers expect to be bribed so that people can get away with lawlessness, and the corruption goes straight up to the highest office. Since I didn't know anything about the case (and just about everyone else did), I could not know if some cop had something against the defendant, and framed him, or if someone had been bribed one way or another. There was a list of about 50 witnesses that were going to testify, half of them in law enforcement, but we didn't know whose side they were on.

But having this additional information was not necessary for deciding if I could be a good juror, all I had to do was promise that I could be unbiased and base my judgement only on the facts presented by the witnesses and the evidence. In my opinion, this is an impossible requirement for any juror. We all have preconceptions about people, and we go in with assumptions about certain professions, races, accents, ethnicities, and the legal system in general, no matter how much we want to believe these preconceptions aren't there. How can any person be asked to be completely objective and base their judgement only on what is heard in court? This was excuse number two.

In watching the juror selection process, I could see that the lawyers were doing their best to pick jurors without any prior knowledge of the case, and without expertise in any of the areas where evidence would come from. For example, one piece of evidence was the blood test taken and the extrapolation done to determine what the defendant's blood-alcohol level was at the time of the incident. There were lots of nurses and phlebotomists in the jury box (I don't know how there were so many!) but they were questioned heavily by the prosecuting lawyers about their expertise, and whether they would be able to set it aside during the trial. Why would you want to set aside your expertise when you might be able to interpret the witness' testimony and find a lie or an error in their reasoning? It seemed to me like the lawyers wanted to fill the jury with people who were uneducated and who couldn't interpret any of the evidence for themselves. I disagree with this practice. I would want people on the jury who could understand the testimony, be able to explain it to other jurors who maybe did not understand it, and then determine whether or not it fits with reality.

My final problem with being a juror was that I would have to pass judgement, but I would not be allowed to determine (with the other jurors of course), the appropriate punishment, that was up to the judge. Dr. Corasanti had five or six charges against him. I knew for a fact that I would want to play around with determining punishment by picking carefully which charges he was found guilty of. This is illegal for a jury to do, but I would be empathizing with the defendant. I would be trying to determine how I might feel if I drove tipsy (like so many people do in this country, unfortunately it is true), hit someone by accident, freaked out because I knew how it would negatively impact my life, and tried to cover it up. Of course it's wrong, but we are all human beings with weaknesses trying to ensure stability in our lives. And what I think is the appropriate punishment for this may be very different from what a judge or the law thinks is appropriate.

In the end, I did not have to be a juror on this case, all I needed as a reason to get off the hook was that I have a new job starting in North Dakota before a month is up, and I will have to relocate there. I spent the whole day in the court room worrying that maybe the judge would hang on to me for some crazy reason (i.e., I had never heard of the case, having been in Kenya for three months!). I think that jury duty is an important responsibility, but I in no way agree that any jury can be completely objective, or that it should be filled with people without expertise, or that the jury should not also be responsible in part for determining punishment. But who knows, maybe I will be in court some day and will see exactly why our system is the way it is, and I will want it that way...