My day in court, cont.

I was on a jury in a criminal trial  this past week. We heard testimony on Tuesday and Wednesday and deliberated Thursday and Friday.  We ended up a hung jury, stuck at 10-2.  I felt that the process worked as it should and everyone comported themselves well -- but at the end, tempers frayed, several people in the majority expressed shame about not being able to come to a verdict, and I seemed to be the only one who felt good about the process and glad to have been there.

In a post I wrote last week during jury selection, I called jury duty the civilized face of a brutal criminal justice system. Ditto the court proceeding as a whole. Leave aside biased law enforcement, Draconian sentencing guidelines and brutal prison conditions -- not to mention environments of concentrated poverty and lack of opportunity -- and justice may happen in the court room, viewed alone. (Except for several strains of cancer the patient is healthy.) Propriety was observed by all parties, defense counsel was competent, the judge kept good control of the proceedings, the jury clearly understood its charge and duties, no one seemed in the grip of any bias or animus, and deliberation for the most part stayed on point and orderly.

Essex County in New Jersey spans Newark, a very poor city; Millburn, a true outpost of Richistan, USA; some very poor inner ring suburbs, and suburbs with varying mixes of rich, poor and middle.  The voir dire reflected that mix, minus the extremes. Perhaps it was a cross section of the American middle class as it's devolved.

My day in court

I was on jury duty today. They treat jurors right in Newark. The free coffee is good, the wireless is good, the chairs don't kill you. There's even a small landscaped area outside the front doors, where I spent a pleasant hour during lunch, bending my laptop into the shade. The orientation video was effective (and followed by a short video pitch for volunteers to serve as Court Appointed Special Advocates for foster children that made me cry a little). The master of ceremonies for jurors was jovial and funny ("the intercoms reach everywhere, including the bathroom. So -- Jurors! If you're in the bathroom, and you hear your name called, cut it short"). The judge during voir dire was respectful, friendly, almost courtly to the jurors. All this was as it should be.

And yet, after reading a rash of articles recently about the depravities of criminal justice in the U.S. -- the mass incarceration, the inane mandatory minimum sentencing, the grotesque overuse of solitary confinement, the ubiquity of rape, the law-shaping clout of the private prison industry, the mass deportations, the faux forensic "science" deployed by prosecutors -- I couldn't help but reflect that I was being shown the civil public face of brutal penal system.