All Rise

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

There was another post that was next in my queue, but I had jury duty last week and feel the need to talk about it. On Thursday morning at 8 am I reported to the Waltham District Court, wondering whether I would have a say in someone's future. In 2006 I served on a jury that, after 10 days of testimony, acquitted a first-degree murderer. It was a Dorchester shooting, the kids were on bikes for christ's sake. As jurors we were taken by motorcade to the neighborhood, walked around, shown pictures, etc. It was an incredibly real experience, for lack of a better way to describe it. The witnesses, the bloody clothes, the full courtroom when we read the verdict. The truth, according to me, was that he did it. There was simply no one else that could have fired the shot. But the defendant, a boy who had been in prison for two years awaiting trial, was innocent until proven guilty, and the prosecutor could not do it. There were too many holes in the story, too many unanswered questions. It was clear when we read the verdict (amidst the cries and angry shouts of the victim's family), the DA was shocked. It was his case to lose and for us, the jury, reasonable doubt of his guilt remained.

The boy went free. I cried and cried. He had killed someone else, but looking at his case through the lens of our justice system and its rules, he was free. We were told that as a jury, our decision is always the right one. Even so, it felt awful and I've never forgotten it.

I was not summoned again until now. Last Thursday was sunny and we sat in a nice room all morning. Most people dread jury duty, but show me a place where I can sit in peace, drink coffee and read quietly without kids yapping at my feet for an extended period of time, and I'll show you a happy Kristen. (Although, this was my book. My mom hat is, annoyingly, never fully off.)

I suspect jury duty gets a bad rap because most people don't see anything as a result of their waiting. They just get dismissed after a long day. Anyone that ends up serving on a jury though, I guarantee you the experience changes their tune.

So last Thursday they impaneled a jury for an assault and battery case (in conjunction with malicious destruction of property under $250) around 3 pm. The wait until then was, admittedly, long. I was the first one picked and took my seat. Opening statements described a scene a year and a half ago, where, after being broken up with over many things, the boyfriend pulled a knife on himself and begged the girlfriend to just push it into him, end his life, he was ruined without her. At one point he grabbed her face, threw things, etc. A general rage about the relationship being called off (except by the way, he had told her he was seeing someone else, and that someone else turned out to be in the courtroom the entire time!).

After he left the scene, there were hundreds of texts between the two of them. The transcript was an inch thick and she, the girlfriend, eventually stopped responding. He called her every nasty name in the book when he wasn't begging her to take him back. He had gone ballistic.

Both the girlfriend and the boyfriend testified, along with the police officer who had written up the incident when the girlfriend reported it as domestic violence the next day. Everything the girlfriend said, the boyfriend denied. It was essentially a bad breakup of a couple in their 20s who brought out the worst in each other.

When we went into deliberations at the end of the day Friday, we (the jury) knew two things to be certain: that we believed her, but that no crime had been committed. It sucked. Applying the conditions of the charge the judge had outlined, and the fact that there was no evidence, an assault and battery conviction just didn't fit and we couldn't do it. We did find him guilty of ruining some of her stuff - he basically admitted to it in the text messages later on so that was much more black and white. But there was nothing to corroborate the girlfriend's claims. No photo of the knife (pictures had been taken of her damaged property), no bruising or bodily harm. Surprisingly that does not need to be present for an assault and battery conviction, but her allegations were vehemently denied by the boyfriend when he took the stand. We felt stymied.

Oh I forgot to mention. The girlfriend? She swam in the 2004 Olympics in Athens. And she won a gold medal. Knowing also that she is currently training for Rio for this summer's games, I felt like we were in the presence of greatness and here she was, just another girl in a bad relationship. I could not even look at her on the way out of the courtroom after we read the verdicts. I wanted to say, "I believe you! He did lie about X and he did call you Y, but unfortunately that is not a crime in the eyes of the law :( ". It was so, so hard.

What makes it actually harder is that there is no closure or debriefing when it is over. Deliberating with your fellow jurors helps process it all, but for me, last Friday night at 5:30 pm when they opened the courthouse doors and said, "Good night jurors! Thanks for serving, see you in 3 years!" I felt a little shell shocked. Having spent just 2 days with the other 6 jurors, I felt very close to them. We had made this huge decision affecting the lives of two people (albeit quite differently) and, like, that was it! They walked off, I walked off, c'est fini.

People whine, complain and try to weasel their way out of jury duty service. There's never a good day for it. Of course you have work and kids and a life. But to take a minute because you are being asked to make a judgment on someone else's life, isn't that a privilege and an awesome responsibility? I think so.

Ironically, Jason had jury duty today. He gleefully texted me at 10:30 am that he was out. But just a minute ago he looked over at me writing this post and said, "You know, I am actually a little bummed I got dismissed so early today. I hardly got anything done." As I said, the appeal of a quiet few hours is as great as anything right now, so may the record reflect he could at least appreciate jury duty for that ;)