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30 Days In The Hole
for
October 14, 2004
I just convicted a man of a crime. It was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do. It was also one of the most important.
At the end of the trial, the judge quoted another, deceased judge, who said there were only two things the government asks you to do. The first is to fight for your country. The other, to serve on a jury. That indicates just how crucial jury service is—it’s on par with defense of the country. One might even argue that jury duty itself is a form of defending the country, from within.
I found this somewhat comforting, after I made a decision I never thought would be so hard. I have spent years discussing the jury system, learning about it, and crime, and virtually everything that goes into the administration of justice; I had always thought that being on a jury would be like writing a paper. You do the research, you examine and explore the issues, mining testimony for fact, and in the end, you and your eleven jury-mates—forced to be friends for a fixed period of time—come to the only logical conclusion.
Of course, I always knew that there were such things as hung juries, and I consistently believed that they were a natural outgrowth of either bad lawyering, or bad circumstances. However, I never believed that I’d be the one who might send a jury to that point. I found myself arguing the very legalistic point of whether the Government had actually done its job and proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Meanwhile, the rest of the jurors had already gotten me to admit that I believed the person had done that of which he had been accused. Yet I persisted in saying that although the Government had presented all this evidence, I didn’t believe they had actually proved that the defendant was guilty.
As the day progressed, I did come to the realization that he was definitely guilty, and that the only doubt I had had to do with the fact that this was so serious—I was sending someone to jail. My doubt was purely emotional, and while a reasonable emotion, it was not the sort of doubt about the proof that a reasonable person would entertain.
Clearly, then, I feel that the decision I made was right, and I was glad to have been exposed to the other side of the lawyer’s experience. But I did realize that it was hard. And while I’m totally unsure as to whether I could ever pull a trigger or coordinate an attack on behalf of my country, at least I know for sure that I can sit on a jury and find the facts.
This was Law and Serious , and it appeared on October 14, 2004 7:53 PM.
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Comments
I had to do this a year ago, and like you, I felt confident about our decision, but still…12 months later it still haunts me. I found out afterwards that the man had been on parole when the incident happened and therefore was up for a very significant amount of time in jail upon sentencing, a step that we as the jury were not involved in.
I’m just very conscious of how easy my own life has been to this point. If I’d been born into different circumstances, would I have been able to resist thos forces that drove the man I sent to prison for 25 years?
Posted by: chelle at December 6, 2004 3:38 PM
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