Hard-boiled Jury Duty: A New York City murder trial juror finishes deliberating
Everyone who ever had secret Spiderman dreams or ambitions for greatness of any stripe needs to be on jury duty. Pronto. It’s hardy, healthy, unusually strenuous and unusually unselfish exercise, if you do it right, and I recommend it to anyone, especially those who think they couldn’t stomach a serious trial.
To elaborate from the beginning: I am not one of those jury duty fanatics. I shambled through the same grumbling, dragging, meshugenah act that all Responsible Employees are expected to adopt, hopefully saving my Corporation and Team days if not weeks of anxious separation from me. If your boss doesn’t pay you, you get 40 bucks a day and not a lick of apology. If you have freelancer or high-pressure-job woes, park them at the door. And yet, dear reader, despite the act and the work worries precipitating it, getting off duty is not how my cookie crumbled. I got picked within two hours of my first exposure to waiting in City Hall, ever, and I’m glad of it.
Here’s why: in all likelihood, you may never have a chance to make a decision this important that doesn’t stem from concerns for yourself or your family. It’s good, damn rare practice in pragmatic decision-making that doesn’t involve endless navel-gazing and me-me-me sweetheart moments of any kind. Your fellow jurors—at least, mine—can surprise and delight and humble you with sharp thinking, tenacity and unusual reservoirs of patience. You enjoy both the luxury and the pressure of having the entire world of trivia, irritations and life swept aside until you back into a decision—and only when you reach a decision do you get your life, good bad or ugly, returned to you. And, plebe as it sounds, it can turn out to be a superhero challenge.
The murder story was pretty simple, almost Greeky-classically so: a bunch of guys hanging out on a block in Spanish Harlem, early evening on Mother’s Day, 1990. A guy, dramatically named Orestes Herrera, from another neighborhood swings down in his Lincoln Towncar, talking shit out the window. He turns around the block and returns; more of the same. A leader of the guys standing around, Richie, has had drug-related problems with Orestes, so when the car swings by a second time he produces a gun for someone to shoot. The defendant—a loser, a “wannabe” according to two eyewitnesses—rushes up, saying “I’ll do it, I’ll do it”, takes the gun in a slow trot down the block, squares with the car at the traffic light, fires seven shots to the driver’s side with surprising precision until one enters Orestes’ head and kills him. The theatrical edge to the whole scene only deepens when you realize all of the guys on the scene have character-type street names: Ivan, Richie, Hosie, Sambo, Pito, Evvie. The defendant’s nickname is Cholo; his real name is Martin.
The case unrolled over five working days and rendered us all vegetables with notepads. You’re only there a cumulative five hours a day, but the combined pressure of details, repetition, buzzingly bright municipal lights, highly starchy food and general unrealness, and you’re positively wiped every day. I had this recurring moment like a strobe: boredom alternating with this mildly anesthetized shock, quickly followed by a small panic, worry over details, minor guilt. Back to boredom.
You don’t ask the questions. You don’t say anything. You listen, in New York City you can now take notes (these don’t go home with you, though). A lot of intensive, baroque doodling, but also a lot of tiny facts and words written down.
And then you have the other jurors. Since you’re not allowed to talk turkey with anyone about the case, your most obvious point of commonality is shot from the beginning. You find yourself sort of sheepishly nodding at each other, gradually and tentatively trading cell phone and snack food tips (stand in the northwest corner of the hallway to receive calls; there’s a Chinese deli with diet root beer on Centre and Broome). It’s a funny feeling: wordless solidarity with strangers, while you all basically cut school by municipal sanction. You get the distinct, but untrue, feeling at first that you’re a random in a group of randoms. Only when the case is released to you for deliberating do you finally start speaking, and the transformation from random to a full peel-back of each person’s stance, experience, emotions, critical facilities and general stuff of character, comes within literally a few hours.
Our group didn’t bully, beg, holler, or excessively cajole. We took breaks that were all kinds of hootenanny fun; we pick-nicked all over the deliberating room, made messes, slouched and reclined with none of the commando-raid divisive body language you might expect. Our collectively hottest moment got expressed only through some heavily aerobic knitting by our forewoman—otherwise a gentle, well-spoken woman in her early thirties. Everyone was young, our oldest was 35 and eight out of twelve jurors were under 30. We busted some fairly endless discussions over sequestered, Court-purchased dinners (there were two and a half days of those) about the oblique logic of the lawyers who picked us out. But nobody really got anywhere with the speculation, and eventually the topic dropped. Initially, what we had in common was only this: we had all been oddly, if hesitantly, drawn to the moment when the strictures came off, and so many immobile, “street” faces could animate and tell what they thought and were about.
The deliberating rooms look like school broom closets, but more high-class. Wood-paneled walls at the bottoms, heavy cream plaster on the top half, a huge institutional clock, little hooks on one wall for coats, no windows, two individual, gender-specific bathrooms. My memory of it is high-toned, sepia-colored because of the walls but warm and vivid with fluctuating pressures and conversation. So much Big Stuff to contain in an airless little room. We kept all the evidence with us there, fingering the bullets, scrutinizing the street diagrams, especially poring over the plea bargains all the witnesses seemed to have, along with the picnic gear: a mega-box of Oreos, some salted soybeans, Little Debbie coffee cakes.
You come to a verdict, guilty or not, and then you consider the charge. The judge gave us four charges to consider, basically revolving around intent. Murder in the second degree could go one of two, equally serious routes: with an intention to kill, or with a “depraved indifference to human life”. On the less serious side, you had manslaughter in the first or second degrees. First means you meant to cause “serious physical injury” and you killed someone. Second means you were behaving “recklessly” and you killed someone.
We came to our verdict in one room, and the next day finished in another. This room had huge grimy windows, gutted-looking air conditioners, and a bleached-out look. People spent at least an hour at the end getting ready to do it, just free-styling with their thoughts. Something about the new room—the exits through the windows, the hard-looking light, maybe just the change of venue—felt like time was running out, which it was.
That forty-five minutes was the hardest. I had been a more vocal juror with an early bent towards the verdict we decided upon, so my pressure had been to stay quiet and not sway by too much speaking. Marce, the forewoman, chewed through several cinnamon toothpicks, not speaking. Arthur continued his silent, elaborately lovely doodles, head bent down. Eric spoke one of the most honest, well-turned-out statements of thanks I have ever received from a near-stranger, to all of us. Xaverie and Roxane each massaged their temples and rolled their necks. A lot of toe-tapping, a lot of pencil-rolling. The room was extraordinarily hot. Heather, who arguably was our social glue, the one wielding camera and busting on Frank, the head guard, was visibly trembling. I am a sloucher, a get-through-it, given to hardness when I need some mental help. Get me the fuck out of here. I could figure it out later.
The final courtroom with distinctly bigger, more glossy, befitting a glamour movie moment, right at the point where you’re looking to minimize high feeling and do some procedural work. Of course, it isn’t procedural at all. This is the Big Moment, the one you squirm against, the one that troubles your sleep. The one everyone wants to hear a small, bite-sized coloratura rendition of later on. Everybody marches in (juries do everything together, like some character-carving, high-intensity outdoor camp) with an underwater feeling, and then everyone says the word guilty, one at a time. There were about eight guards around the defendant rather than the everyday two, which seemed a little insulting to his calm. The judge thanked us, looking more than ever like the Where’s Waldo? doodles we had of him on our notepads, soon to be shredded, back in the deliberating room. Then we left with our passes stamped and a few hours left, on a Friday afternoon.
Nobody could go. Twelve people hugging makes for 144 exit hugs, a lot of flying winter gear, a lot of raw foot-stamping waiting without a plan for the afternoon.
A verdict is the answer you develop for a very specific, defined problem, and within those boundaries we were all confident. Going outside of those boundaries for the decision was not only not our burden to weigh, but illegal. But we all had pictures, connected like triptychs, in our heads that didn’t fall into the equation but still wouldn’t wash. The key witness as a nine-year-old carrying bags of heroin across the street. The same witness, in less soft-focus, going at his stepfather with a baseball bat. The photo of Orestes in his pimp hat, shot in someone’s living room. My image is of Cholo ten years ago, big with long scrawny hands, wanting in and getting it, in spades.
I’m still fierce about doing it, glad to try. Someone else should pour so thoroughly and with such blood over these matters if they ever come to roost on me, and I’m in trouble. Not that my puny personal effort ran the show, not without eleven other people to round me out. If you think you wouldn’t have stomach for it, you should march down to the court house and sign up post-haste. You’ll get the stomach by doing it, and that’s some stomach—heartache, trouble, hard thinking, persistance—almost everyone sorely needs.
—Jude Stewart for Green magazine
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