juryadmin
10-07-2006, 01:04 PM
(This is my attempt to prime the pump, as it were, of this new forum. I am also writing because I have long wanted to discuss these events. I am writing from memory and it's possible that I have omitted some events and gotten others wrong, but it should still be substantially accurate. I welcome clarifications about procedures, or anything else, from people who know more about criminal trials than I do.)
----
Several years ago I was summoned for jury duty in the criminal courts of Broward County, Florida. I had never served on a jury or even been summoned, I had the time and was eager to participate in what I saw as an important civic duty. Due to my opinionated nature I thought it was unlikely that I would ever be selected to serve on a jury, but I figured that the experience would be interesting whether I was selected or not, and that if selected I would be a fair and thoughtful juror. I reasoned that I would want someone like myself to sit on my jury if I were ever on trial, particularly if I were innocent.
I was a bit nervous on the morning when I reported to the jurur-selection room at the Broward Country Courthouse. My nervousness was due to my not knowing much about how jury selection worked, and thinking it was possible that I would be selected for a jury in a drug or other case where I disapproved of the law, and that I would not know how to handle such a situation. I wanted to serve on a jury but didn't want to be thought to have withheld information about my views. I asked one of the courthouse clerks what to do if I had moral qualms about the law under which the defendant was charged. She told me that if I had questions I should ask the judge.
It turned out that my concerns were for naught, as I was selected for the juror pool in a domestic-violence case. No qualms for me there. We were brought to the courtroom and seated for voire dire.
The voire dire was more casual than I expected. We were introduced to the prosecutor, defense attorney and defendant and told something about the case. The judge told us about our role as jurors (to judge facts). I don't remember whether we were given written questionnaires; I don't think so. The prosecutor and the defense attorney were both women. The defense attorney was a young (late 20s?) public defender and seemed inexperienced. The prosecutor was older and more mature and confident in demeanor. They asked us first about the most-obvious disqualifying issues (were any of us related to or acquainted with the defendant or anyone else who was involved in the case? did any of us already have a strong opinion about the defendant's guilt?) and then moved on to increasingly subtle issues (what did we do for a living? what were our hobbies? had we or anyone in our immediate family served in the military?). Finally the prosecutor and defense attorney asked most of us a lot of questions related to our ability to be fair. The prosecutor wanted to know if we were predisposed to acquit; the defense attorney wanted to know if we were predisposed to convict. Would we judge the facts as we saw them or be easily swayed by the group? It seemed as though both attorneys, and particularly the public defender, did a poor job of asking these questions. Their selection of which prospective juror to ask which question seemed haphazard. I remember being asked only one direct question, by the defense attorney, about my willingness to decide the case based strictly on the facts. I began to get a strong impression that the system didn't have a lot of consideration for the defendant, and that being an impecunious criminal defendant is a very bad thing.
Some prospective jurors -- lawyers, the wife of a police officer, a guy who worked for the IRS, people with important personal commitments that conflicted with jury service -- were dismissed early in the voire dire process. A woman who had met the judge socially at a parents' event at a school, or something along those lines, was also dismissed. The rest of those dismissed were let go at the end of voire dire. To my great surprise I was selected as a juror, even though I thought that my answers to questions might have flagged me as a conservative throw-the-book-at-them type (one of my responses to the hobby question was "shooting sports"). There were six jurors and six alternates.
The trial was straightforward. The defendant was accused of beating his live-in girlfriend with a tubular metal broomstick. The jury had the option to acquit or to convict for battery or aggravated battery, a more serious charge. Someone read the appropriate law to us.
The prosecution made its case without much difficulty. The defendant's ex-girlfriend appeared as a witness, apparently against her will, and testified emotionally as to how she had come to know the defendant and to live with him and about how he had beaten her. I do not remember the circumstances of the beating but she discussed them as well. They had quarreled about something. I also don't remember if the public defender cross-examined the ex-girlfriend; I don't think she did, as I would probably have remembered it. The prosecution also called as a witness a Fort Lauderdale police officer who had responded to the girlfriend's emergency call. The public defender asked the officer a cursory question. I don't remember what it was but I remember that it seemed pointless at the time.
The prosecutor gave the jury Polaroid photos showing the victim with a number of nasty welts on her upper body, and we passed the photos around until everyone had seen them. She showed us the broomstick that the defendant had used as a weapon. It was bent in the middle and the prosecutor went out of her way to emphasize how destructive a weapon it was. (I thought she was exaggerating almost to the point of hysteria, since the stick, even though it was metal, was less massive than a wooden broomstick would have been. It was also apparent that the defendant, who was obviously a strong young man, had not hit his relatively frail girlfriend in the head or hard enough to break bones.)
(At some point during the trial the judge asked the jury if we wanted the court to stay in session rather than take a break, so that he could conclude the trial in one day. Many of us nodded yes (I did), so we didn't take the break. I remember thinking at the time that this was a callous way to handle a process that would determine the defendant's fate, but in hindsight I don't think there was anything wrong with it. If I were a defendant and the jury wanted to take a break, I would certainly hope that they would be given the chance to do so.)
When it was the defense's turn to make its case it became clear very quickly that the public defender was inept. Her client was a young, strong guy accused of beating a somewhat-older and slightly built woman with a weapon, and the defense attorney tried to argue that it was self-defense. It was simply unbelievable. She compounded her error by letting the defendant testify in his own behalf (or maybe he insisted). He was rambling and inarticulate and knocked down his own case by self-righteously insisting that his weak lady-friend's unarmed provocations justified strong self-defense measures on his part. He was pathetic and I felt sorry for him. His defense was weak and it seemed obvious that his attorney wasn't doing much for him.
An aside about the people. The defendant and his ex-girlfriend were black and (if I remember correctly) everyone else in the courtroom was white. The defendant and the ex-girlfriend were distinctly lower-class; the jurors and most of the other people who were there seemed to be middle-class. Most of the people were Anglos with some Hispanics (including, I believe, the prosecutor). Out of six people on the jury at least two were immigrants. The bailiffs mostly looked like guys who had retired from police jobs in New York and moved to Florida, and I think that in some cases that is who they were. The ex-girlfriend was dressed as if for church in a prim and colorful dress. The defendant had been incarcerated for a long time before the trial, and he looked (and smelled) like it.
The defense and prosecuting attorneys' closing arguments were almost caricatures. I suppose they were doing their best with what they had. The prosecutor emphasized the heinous nature of the crime, the vicious defendant, the deadly broomstick and so forth. I thought that her presentation was overdone and that she almost showed contempt for our intelligence, but she at least made her case clearly. The public defender was worse, because she kept arguing self-defense when self-defense wasn't credible. On the other hand, to succeed she needed only to create doubt in just one out of the six jurors, so maybe her argument was the right one to make despite what I thought was its obvious lack of appeal. If there had been one extremely credulous and stubborn person on the jury the defense might have prevailed. Otherwise it seemed to me that she had no chance to gain acquittal, though conviction on the lesser charge was possible.
After the closing arguments the judge gave us instructions. He told us that we could acquit, convict on battery, the lesser charge, or convict on aggravated battery. We were given printed copies of the relevant law and the physical evidence and were sent to the jury room to decide. We were told that a bailiff would be outside the jury-room door and that we should let him know when we had reached a decision or were deadlocked or needed anything.
Our deliberations did not take more than an hour, perhaps quite a bit less. As I mentioned, we were a six-person jury, two women and four men IIRC. We got down to business immediately and selected a foreman by consensus. Someone suggested that we should go around the table and give our impressions in turn and we all agreed. All but one or two of us thought that the defendant was obviously guilty of at least battery. It has been some years, and I do not remember the sequence of the discussion, but I remember that despite our individual opinions going into deliberations we made a conscientious effort to determine if there was reason to reject the defendant's claim of self-defense. We all recognized, and IIRC the man we selected as foreman stated explicitly, that we held the defendant's freedom in our hands and should take great care in deciding his case.
It was soon apparent that it would be extremely difficult to accept the defendant's claim of self-defense. I remember arguing that even if the girlfriend had provoked the defendant viciously and attacked him physically, as most of us agreed might well have occurred, he could have left the scene or physically restrained her without beating her, and certainly without beating her with a stick. Another juror made the similar point that self-defense doesn't mean you get to unload on anyone who provokes you. One juror, a woman who was an immigrant from a Latin American country, was hesitant. She said that in the country she came from it would not have been considered a crime for a man to beat his woman. Several of the rest of us, me included, were taken aback by her statement and argued in response that such behavior was not permitted under our law. We argued with her a bit more on this point, and eventually the woman conceded that the defendant was indeed guilty by the standards we were supposed to uphold.
We then tried to reach a consensus on whether the defendant was guilty of simple battery or aggravated battery. Each of us read and re-read the legal definitions of these crimes that the judge had given us. It seemed clear to me that the defendant was guilty of aggravated battery, as the law clearly defined aggravated battery as battery with a weapon, and my fellow jurors agreed.
After we delivered our verdict the judge asked us if we wanted to stay in the courtroom to watch him sentence the defendant, and we all agreed to stay. We were ushered from the jury box to the spectators' area. The judge then noted that the defendant had a prior conviction for a violent crime -- threatening someone with a knife -- and sentenced him to the maximum sentence, which was twelve years. In Florida he is likely to serve this entire sentence, which meant 10+ years in jail for him (he had already been in prison for more than a year awaiting trial).
I was shocked by the severity of the sentence. I had expected something like two to four years. My fellow ex-jurors and I walked to the parking garage. Some of us discussed the sentence, which I think we all found sobering. I don't know if any of the other jurors thought it was excessive.
I don't know if the defendant deserved the long sentence. Maybe he did. If I had to relive my experience on that jury I might have done a few things differently. I might not have voted to convict on aggravated battery -- i.e., I might have voted for simple battery instead. During our deliberation I might have relayed to the judge a question about the ranges of punishments for simple and aggravated battery. I suspect, however, that the judge would have refused to provide this information. And I might have convicted on aggravated battery after all, because the guy did use a weapon, though I think it was a borderline case (it was a flimsy weapon and the evidence from the Polaroids suggested that he had restrained himself to some degree). Of course this is all hindsight and does not take into account what may have been the biggest factor in the severe sentence: the prior conviction. There is no way I could have known about that, and it may indicate that the defendant really did deserve twelve years.
One thing that I didn't do but should have done was ask the judge and attorneys, after the trial was over, for more information. Was the defendant someone with a long history of violence whose lady friend was scared to testify against him? Was he just a stupid jerk who allowed a manipulative girlfriend to provoke him and was prosecuted to set an example? Why did this case even go to trial -- was it such a sure thing that the prosecution refused to offer a plea bargain? did the defendant insist on his day in court? did the public defender reject a plea deal because she thought there was a chance for acquittal if she lucked into a gullible juror? Who knows. I wish I had asked these questions when I had the chance.
----
Several years ago I was summoned for jury duty in the criminal courts of Broward County, Florida. I had never served on a jury or even been summoned, I had the time and was eager to participate in what I saw as an important civic duty. Due to my opinionated nature I thought it was unlikely that I would ever be selected to serve on a jury, but I figured that the experience would be interesting whether I was selected or not, and that if selected I would be a fair and thoughtful juror. I reasoned that I would want someone like myself to sit on my jury if I were ever on trial, particularly if I were innocent.
I was a bit nervous on the morning when I reported to the jurur-selection room at the Broward Country Courthouse. My nervousness was due to my not knowing much about how jury selection worked, and thinking it was possible that I would be selected for a jury in a drug or other case where I disapproved of the law, and that I would not know how to handle such a situation. I wanted to serve on a jury but didn't want to be thought to have withheld information about my views. I asked one of the courthouse clerks what to do if I had moral qualms about the law under which the defendant was charged. She told me that if I had questions I should ask the judge.
It turned out that my concerns were for naught, as I was selected for the juror pool in a domestic-violence case. No qualms for me there. We were brought to the courtroom and seated for voire dire.
The voire dire was more casual than I expected. We were introduced to the prosecutor, defense attorney and defendant and told something about the case. The judge told us about our role as jurors (to judge facts). I don't remember whether we were given written questionnaires; I don't think so. The prosecutor and the defense attorney were both women. The defense attorney was a young (late 20s?) public defender and seemed inexperienced. The prosecutor was older and more mature and confident in demeanor. They asked us first about the most-obvious disqualifying issues (were any of us related to or acquainted with the defendant or anyone else who was involved in the case? did any of us already have a strong opinion about the defendant's guilt?) and then moved on to increasingly subtle issues (what did we do for a living? what were our hobbies? had we or anyone in our immediate family served in the military?). Finally the prosecutor and defense attorney asked most of us a lot of questions related to our ability to be fair. The prosecutor wanted to know if we were predisposed to acquit; the defense attorney wanted to know if we were predisposed to convict. Would we judge the facts as we saw them or be easily swayed by the group? It seemed as though both attorneys, and particularly the public defender, did a poor job of asking these questions. Their selection of which prospective juror to ask which question seemed haphazard. I remember being asked only one direct question, by the defense attorney, about my willingness to decide the case based strictly on the facts. I began to get a strong impression that the system didn't have a lot of consideration for the defendant, and that being an impecunious criminal defendant is a very bad thing.
Some prospective jurors -- lawyers, the wife of a police officer, a guy who worked for the IRS, people with important personal commitments that conflicted with jury service -- were dismissed early in the voire dire process. A woman who had met the judge socially at a parents' event at a school, or something along those lines, was also dismissed. The rest of those dismissed were let go at the end of voire dire. To my great surprise I was selected as a juror, even though I thought that my answers to questions might have flagged me as a conservative throw-the-book-at-them type (one of my responses to the hobby question was "shooting sports"). There were six jurors and six alternates.
The trial was straightforward. The defendant was accused of beating his live-in girlfriend with a tubular metal broomstick. The jury had the option to acquit or to convict for battery or aggravated battery, a more serious charge. Someone read the appropriate law to us.
The prosecution made its case without much difficulty. The defendant's ex-girlfriend appeared as a witness, apparently against her will, and testified emotionally as to how she had come to know the defendant and to live with him and about how he had beaten her. I do not remember the circumstances of the beating but she discussed them as well. They had quarreled about something. I also don't remember if the public defender cross-examined the ex-girlfriend; I don't think she did, as I would probably have remembered it. The prosecution also called as a witness a Fort Lauderdale police officer who had responded to the girlfriend's emergency call. The public defender asked the officer a cursory question. I don't remember what it was but I remember that it seemed pointless at the time.
The prosecutor gave the jury Polaroid photos showing the victim with a number of nasty welts on her upper body, and we passed the photos around until everyone had seen them. She showed us the broomstick that the defendant had used as a weapon. It was bent in the middle and the prosecutor went out of her way to emphasize how destructive a weapon it was. (I thought she was exaggerating almost to the point of hysteria, since the stick, even though it was metal, was less massive than a wooden broomstick would have been. It was also apparent that the defendant, who was obviously a strong young man, had not hit his relatively frail girlfriend in the head or hard enough to break bones.)
(At some point during the trial the judge asked the jury if we wanted the court to stay in session rather than take a break, so that he could conclude the trial in one day. Many of us nodded yes (I did), so we didn't take the break. I remember thinking at the time that this was a callous way to handle a process that would determine the defendant's fate, but in hindsight I don't think there was anything wrong with it. If I were a defendant and the jury wanted to take a break, I would certainly hope that they would be given the chance to do so.)
When it was the defense's turn to make its case it became clear very quickly that the public defender was inept. Her client was a young, strong guy accused of beating a somewhat-older and slightly built woman with a weapon, and the defense attorney tried to argue that it was self-defense. It was simply unbelievable. She compounded her error by letting the defendant testify in his own behalf (or maybe he insisted). He was rambling and inarticulate and knocked down his own case by self-righteously insisting that his weak lady-friend's unarmed provocations justified strong self-defense measures on his part. He was pathetic and I felt sorry for him. His defense was weak and it seemed obvious that his attorney wasn't doing much for him.
An aside about the people. The defendant and his ex-girlfriend were black and (if I remember correctly) everyone else in the courtroom was white. The defendant and the ex-girlfriend were distinctly lower-class; the jurors and most of the other people who were there seemed to be middle-class. Most of the people were Anglos with some Hispanics (including, I believe, the prosecutor). Out of six people on the jury at least two were immigrants. The bailiffs mostly looked like guys who had retired from police jobs in New York and moved to Florida, and I think that in some cases that is who they were. The ex-girlfriend was dressed as if for church in a prim and colorful dress. The defendant had been incarcerated for a long time before the trial, and he looked (and smelled) like it.
The defense and prosecuting attorneys' closing arguments were almost caricatures. I suppose they were doing their best with what they had. The prosecutor emphasized the heinous nature of the crime, the vicious defendant, the deadly broomstick and so forth. I thought that her presentation was overdone and that she almost showed contempt for our intelligence, but she at least made her case clearly. The public defender was worse, because she kept arguing self-defense when self-defense wasn't credible. On the other hand, to succeed she needed only to create doubt in just one out of the six jurors, so maybe her argument was the right one to make despite what I thought was its obvious lack of appeal. If there had been one extremely credulous and stubborn person on the jury the defense might have prevailed. Otherwise it seemed to me that she had no chance to gain acquittal, though conviction on the lesser charge was possible.
After the closing arguments the judge gave us instructions. He told us that we could acquit, convict on battery, the lesser charge, or convict on aggravated battery. We were given printed copies of the relevant law and the physical evidence and were sent to the jury room to decide. We were told that a bailiff would be outside the jury-room door and that we should let him know when we had reached a decision or were deadlocked or needed anything.
Our deliberations did not take more than an hour, perhaps quite a bit less. As I mentioned, we were a six-person jury, two women and four men IIRC. We got down to business immediately and selected a foreman by consensus. Someone suggested that we should go around the table and give our impressions in turn and we all agreed. All but one or two of us thought that the defendant was obviously guilty of at least battery. It has been some years, and I do not remember the sequence of the discussion, but I remember that despite our individual opinions going into deliberations we made a conscientious effort to determine if there was reason to reject the defendant's claim of self-defense. We all recognized, and IIRC the man we selected as foreman stated explicitly, that we held the defendant's freedom in our hands and should take great care in deciding his case.
It was soon apparent that it would be extremely difficult to accept the defendant's claim of self-defense. I remember arguing that even if the girlfriend had provoked the defendant viciously and attacked him physically, as most of us agreed might well have occurred, he could have left the scene or physically restrained her without beating her, and certainly without beating her with a stick. Another juror made the similar point that self-defense doesn't mean you get to unload on anyone who provokes you. One juror, a woman who was an immigrant from a Latin American country, was hesitant. She said that in the country she came from it would not have been considered a crime for a man to beat his woman. Several of the rest of us, me included, were taken aback by her statement and argued in response that such behavior was not permitted under our law. We argued with her a bit more on this point, and eventually the woman conceded that the defendant was indeed guilty by the standards we were supposed to uphold.
We then tried to reach a consensus on whether the defendant was guilty of simple battery or aggravated battery. Each of us read and re-read the legal definitions of these crimes that the judge had given us. It seemed clear to me that the defendant was guilty of aggravated battery, as the law clearly defined aggravated battery as battery with a weapon, and my fellow jurors agreed.
After we delivered our verdict the judge asked us if we wanted to stay in the courtroom to watch him sentence the defendant, and we all agreed to stay. We were ushered from the jury box to the spectators' area. The judge then noted that the defendant had a prior conviction for a violent crime -- threatening someone with a knife -- and sentenced him to the maximum sentence, which was twelve years. In Florida he is likely to serve this entire sentence, which meant 10+ years in jail for him (he had already been in prison for more than a year awaiting trial).
I was shocked by the severity of the sentence. I had expected something like two to four years. My fellow ex-jurors and I walked to the parking garage. Some of us discussed the sentence, which I think we all found sobering. I don't know if any of the other jurors thought it was excessive.
I don't know if the defendant deserved the long sentence. Maybe he did. If I had to relive my experience on that jury I might have done a few things differently. I might not have voted to convict on aggravated battery -- i.e., I might have voted for simple battery instead. During our deliberation I might have relayed to the judge a question about the ranges of punishments for simple and aggravated battery. I suspect, however, that the judge would have refused to provide this information. And I might have convicted on aggravated battery after all, because the guy did use a weapon, though I think it was a borderline case (it was a flimsy weapon and the evidence from the Polaroids suggested that he had restrained himself to some degree). Of course this is all hindsight and does not take into account what may have been the biggest factor in the severe sentence: the prior conviction. There is no way I could have known about that, and it may indicate that the defendant really did deserve twelve years.
One thing that I didn't do but should have done was ask the judge and attorneys, after the trial was over, for more information. Was the defendant someone with a long history of violence whose lady friend was scared to testify against him? Was he just a stupid jerk who allowed a manipulative girlfriend to provoke him and was prosecuted to set an example? Why did this case even go to trial -- was it such a sure thing that the prosecution refused to offer a plea bargain? did the defendant insist on his day in court? did the public defender reject a plea deal because she thought there was a chance for acquittal if she lucked into a gullible juror? Who knows. I wish I had asked these questions when I had the chance.