On the Jury—Part II

This entry is a follow-up to last week’s “On the Jury—Part I.” If you haven’t yet read that entry, do so before reading this one.


After the closing arguments had taken place, the judge gave us his final instructions and we were sent into the deliberation room. I was very apprehensive at this point. After hearing all of the evidence throughout the two days of the trial, I did not feel supremely confident that the defendant had committed the crime. In fact, the thought that we might convict him and send him to jail put knots into my stomach. My worry was that I was the only one who would feel this way, and I would have to argue against eleven rabid, blood-thirsty conviction cowboys, I would have to refuse to budge, everyone would hate me, and the jury would be hung. At least this way the defendant would have a chance, though. My worst fear was that my innate agreeability would allow me to be convinced and the defendant would go, possibly innocently, to jail, and I would hate myself for the rest of my life starting the next morning.

No pressure.

Filing into the deliberation room, everyone was visibly on edge. Some made too-loud jokes and laughed nervously. Some looked down at the floor and didn’t talk to anyone. Everyone was very polite to one another. Our foreman was an older woman with a gentle demeanor who had been burglarized and robbed many times without ever having had a conviction, but was nevertheless chosen to be on the jury. She read again to us from the judge’s printed instructions and the legal descriptions of the two crimes we were meant to deliberate on: burglary in the first degree and theft over $500. Then it was silent. “Well,” said the foreman. “Should we begin?”

It turns out I needn’t have worried about being the only one with doubts. From a quick survey of the jury after the first few brave people had spoken up, everyone was feeling uneasy about the case. We began compiling a list of the holes in the case on a whiteboard in the room. The board quickly filled up with all the jury members’ particular hang-ups with the evidence. Where was the physical evidence linking the defendant to the crime scene? Why weren’t the watches ID’d as the Jones’ until today? Did the defendant’s complexion really change from uneven and pockmarked to smooth and even between March and August? Why didn’t they bring in a bloodhound to do a definitive trailing of the path of the burglar? Where were the jacket and the hat? Why didn’t they do a line-up of the defendant with other young black guys of light builds? Why on earth did no one check up on the defendant’s alibi? The list went on. Excited chattering groups quickly broke off from the main group, each discussing their own certain takes on the evidence. I was sitting near a middle-aged Hispanic hairdresser and several young women of my age: a black woman, a woman of color of indeterminate race, and another white woman. All of us expressed our disgust in the incompleteness of the evidence and the police’s investigation. The hairdresser weighed in with her professional opinion that the defendant was not, in fact, wearing cornrows in his mugshot.

The mood in the room became almost spirited once we realized, with relief, that we were all more or less on the same page. We opened up the burglar’s backpack, given to us with all of the other physical evidence for our deliberations, and passed around the odd contents remaining after the Jones’ property had been returned to them. There were red and gold candy wrappers covered in Chinese characters and some sort of flyer with an unknown Asian script on it. All the women I was sitting with guffawed when a pink-wrapped Maxi pad was removed from the pack. I hypothesized that the burglar had stolen the backpack and bike from a Chinese girl on his way to the Jones’ neighborhood and everyone laughed in agreement. And an item that one of the lawyers had briefly mentioned to be a “band-aid” was actually a disposable razor blade. “Good thing they actually looked hard at the contents,” somebody noted sarcastically.

The watches were passed around with a slightly different attitude. They were, indeed, gorgeous and expensive watches. Very heavy, with an aura of wealth and success. People handled them gingerly in their plastic evidence bags. I noted to the group that the gold Omega watch that was ID’d by Mr. Jones on the stand that day was of a standard, classic design, shared with most men’s watches. Of course it was gold, which made it more special, but imagine how many watches there existed that looked more or less like this one. There were no engravings or other unique features. We didn’t have the appraiser’s report that would have listed this watch among the other appraised jewelry inherited from Mr. Jones’ deceased parents, either. “I bet these don’t belong to that boy,” said one of the jurors. We murmured an agreement. “But I’m not totally sure they belong to those people either.”

Everyone wondered about Mrs. Coons’ ID of the burglar and the defendant as looking “just like DeAngelo Barksdale from The Wire.” “Hey, have any of you guys ever seen The Wire?” asked one of the jurors. We all looked around the table at each other. “Wow, a room of twelve people where nobody watches cable tv!” somebody exclaimed. So that piece of evidence went by the wayside because of all of us were pop-culturally incompetent.

“I am so angry with all of the lawyers and the police for putting us in this position!” exclaimed a middle-aged real estate agent with a strong twang from the other end of the table. “I can’t believe that they expect us just to send this guy to jail with this kind of evidence.” There were vigorous affirmations of this sentiment from all around the table. At this point, we had been deliberating for about an hour or so. The conversation had slowed. The foreman asked us if we were ready to start deciding the actual verdict. We were.

She suggested that we go around the table, each of us stating what verdict we would give and a brief statement of why. And so we did. Everyone had his or her own reason that was the strongest in their mind. The stutterer came out slowly and red-facedly with his verdict of not guilty from lack of definitive evidence. The African immigrant with the strong accent and the young Hispanic man—who was probably profiled by the police all the time—both opined that the police hadn’t bothered to go any farther in their search than the first black man they saw, and thus the defendant should be not guilty from lack of strong evidence. I said not guilty, for an overall lack of evidence but especially the seemingly bogus watch ID. The real estate agent with the twang was most unconvinced from the lack of DNA or fingerprint evidence. Others had their own reasons.

One juror, a middle-aged, well-spoken white man, agreed that the evidence was, in fact, less than would be desired in a number of instances. “But how would you explain the witnesses’ positive ID’s of the defendant if he weren’t the guy, though? I just don’t know.” He was the only one who did not say “not guilty.” After everyone had said their piece, there was a pause, and all heads turned toward this one man. He looked around and then looked down. “I agree with things that people have been saying,” he started. “I’m uneasy because of the witnesses’ identification of the defendant,” he continued. “But I’ll say ‘not guilty,’ too,” the man finished in a rush of quiet words.

With relief palpable in the room, the foreman filled out the verdict form and went through the double-knock routine at the door to inform the judge’s clerk, a young, type-A law student. After several minutes we were called back in to the courtroom. We filed in, while clerks, defendant, lawyers, and the audience—the defendant’s friends—stood silently, watching us. I noticed gratefully that neither Mr. Jones nor his neighbors were in the courtroom. I didn’t want to have to feel their hatred when we let the man off whom they were convinced was guilty.

“Who will speak for you?” questioned the courtroom clerk.

I pointed at the foreman, and she stood up and said, “I will.”

“How do you find the defendant for the charge of burglary in the first degree?” asked the clerk.

“Not guilty,” said our foreman, enunciating clearly.

With this, a movement went through the courtroom. The defendant’s friends gasped, exclaimed, cried out, began hugging each other. The defendant stood, immovable, face a mask, as he had been throughout almost all of his trial.

We repeated the same verdict for the second charge. Some other stuff might have been said, but I didn’t notice because I was watching the defendant go over to his friends and be overtaken by a mass of jumping, giggling, back-slapping, bear-hugging, and crying. I wondered if two of them lived in the Jones’ neighborhood after all. Tears came to my eyes and my hands were shaking. One of the friends looked over to us and said, “You guys did good today. Real good.” I looked down, too overcome to look at them any more.

When I got home, the first thing I did was to look up The Wire’s web page and find out who plays D’Angelo Barksdale. It’s an actor named Larry Gilliard, Jr. Feeling apprehensive, I went to Gilliard Jr.’s bio. When it came up, I squinted at the small picture in disbelief and enlarged it.

The character D’Angelo Barksdale looks nothing like the defendant. Nothing. NO. THING. I actually laughed out loud as I stared at the picture. I just couldn’t stop laughing. Sure, they are both young black men with slight builds. But their faces are totally different. The defendant’s face was defined, in my opinion, by large eyes with very heavy lids that I never saw reveal more than half of his eyeballs. He also had a very broad nose and well-defined cheekbones. Larry Gilliard, Jr. has light lids over his fully-visible eyes, and a more oval, smoother face. It’s hard for me to describe how little they look like each other. I even went and looked at a picture of Gilliard Jr. as he appears in the tv show, in case I was thrown off by the preppy sweater and smile he wore in his actor profile. No, even in a picture of him playing a street punk he looked nothing like the defendant. For Mrs. Coons to describe the defendant as looking just like D’Angelo Barksdale would be like her describing, say, Audrey Tatou as looking just like Natalie Portman because they’re both young, slender white women with short brown hair. I mean, it’s totally ridiculous. It’s the kind of mistake you’d make if, for example, you were a Mozambican living in the bush who really didn’t have any interaction with white people at all, and only saw them occasionally on other people’s tvs when the electricity was working.

Looking at this picture made me feel more confident that we had done the right thing as a jury. There was clearly an element of racism in the conviction, although it seemed unconscious. The witnesses had obviously seen a real burglary and the real burglar. But they were eager to help their neighbor, and were unfamiliar enough with black men in their every day lives. So much so that they were able to convince themselves that this young black man with suspicious goods in his pocket and sweat on his shirt was in fact the very same young black man they had seen robbing their friend’s house. The police really don’t have enough resources to thoroughly investigate every burglary, and didn’t bother to look too hard for evidence to fill in the gaps after getting the positive ID from the neighbors. No one was lying. No one was trying to mislead anyone. But people make mistakes and oversights out of a conviction of something. But they weren’t able to convince us with their conviction due to a lack of real, hard evidence. Although the defendant had very likely robbed somebody that day, suspicion alone could not convince us of the link between the defendant and this particular burglary. In my firm belief now, after the trial, we the jury were able to make the right decision to not send him to jail. To my surprise, the system of American justice—at least in this one case—worked as designed.