A Trial by Jury (17 page)

I began to look around the room, to let the weight of majority opinion sink in on anyone still wavering.

“I have doubts,” I said. “Vel has doubts. Jim has doubts. Rachel has doubts. Leah has doubts. Dean, I know, has doubts. Pat has doubts. Are these reasonable doubts? Are they the doubts of reasonable people? I hope so. Are they doubts with reasons? I believe so. Let me give mine: there is nothing in all these mounds of evidence, nothing, that
proves
Monte Milcray is lying when he says that he tried to defend himself against a sexual attack.” I paused. “And this is a reason.”

I cannot say how this peroration sounded. I meant what I was saying, but I had certainly crossed into the terrain of oratory—pausing, rounding my sentences, deploying the tropes. Did this matter? I do not know.

Thanking them for giving me the chance to speak, I mentioned that at breakfast I had heard a few people joking about the movie
Twelve Angry Men.
“But I think we have all figured out that there are no trick endings here, no surprise discovery that will suddenly swing down and change everything. Not guilty does not mean innocent. It means something very specific: it means that twelve people could not agree that the state made its case. I believe we are in that situation.”

Here I made a bizarre mistake: not guilty, of course, means (in New York at least) that twelve people
did
agree that the state had
not
made its case. A very different proposition. Curiously, at that final moment I described a hung jury, when that was not at all what I meant. No one, apparently, noticed. Not even I, at the time.

Without pausing, I took the cards out of my pocket and passed them around. Felipe started to speak, but Paige shushed him. There was silence as the cards started to come back, each folded in half. I counted them. Nine. We waited, and two more came in. Eleven. We waited. Still eleven.

At this point there was no confusion about who still held a card. Adelle sat at the corner of the table to my left, where she had now sat for four days. She had a pencil in her hand, and the card on the table in front of her. She was looking fixedly away, up, behind her, out the window.

No one spoke. Paige adopted a contemplative posture, her fingers prayerfully arranged at her brow. Several others closed their eyes and clasped their hands to wait. Felipe put his head down on his folded arms. One sensed everyone in the room concentrating on the blank card in rapt meditation. Adelle breathed audibly, wrote something rapidly on the card, closed it on itself, and pushed it into the middle of the table.

I placed it, consciously and more or less conspicuously, at the bottom of the pile. I wanted the full dismay of the room to land on her if she had voted for a conviction. Then I began to open the cards and read them: not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty. And the last one: not guilty.

The taut silence of the room broke in a gust of relief. There was absolutely no joy, no celebration, no delight. There was only an imprecise emotional surfeit. People were overwhelmed. I think there were few who were not in tears, though I cannot remember anyone's face, because I was choked up myself.

Rapidly, I went to the wall next to the door and buzzed for the bailiff. I returned to my seat only for a moment, to take out a sheet of the paper we used for corresponding with the court and to write on it the message I had been told to send when our deliberations had ended: “The jury has reached a verdict.”

I looked around the room. Several people were embracing, and Paige and Leah were gathered about Adelle, saying encouraging things to her. She looked out over the shoulder of someone giving her a supportive hug, and she said suddenly, tearfully, “If we are doing the right thing, why are we all crying?”

At that instant, the knock came solidly at the door, followed by the requisite bark, “Cease deliberations!” The officer swung the door open, and I stood there with the sheet in my hand.

But as I reached to hand it to him, Adelle cried out: “No! Wait, we're not ready! Not yet.”

I stood there dumbly, with my arm outstretched and the officer looking quizzical. I hesitated, and then turned to him, apologized, and asked him to leave.

With this back-step, the room teetered on the brink of an irrecoverable collapse. At the prospect of our having just snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, several jurors looked ready to go wild. I returned to my place and remained standing, asking for people to stay calm if they could and to hear a proposal.

“This morning,” I began, “as I was thinking about how today might go, I had an idea for a way we might try to express our frustration, our sense that we've been stuck with an impossible task and given inadequate tools. This might be a way for us to move forward. Do you want to hear it?”

I asked, because it was important that I not seem to be steering things overmuch; the moment could not have been more delicate.

Most desperate, Paige took the lead in saying yes.

I opened my notebook: “What we might do,” I said, “is write a message to the court that makes explicit that we are unhappy, in a way, with our own verdict, that we feel we are doing the right thing before the law but something that is not, in the end, really just. I propose that we write a message that reads something like this,” and I read them the statement I had written that morning:

“We the jury wish it to be known to the open court that we feel most strongly that the strict application of the law to the facts established by the evidence in this case does not lead to a truly just verdict. We have, however, reached a verdict in accordance with our charge.”

I looked up. Paige nodded. Yes. Several other people nodded. Yes. I asked, “Could we all agree to that?” No one said no. Including Adelle.

So that was what we did. As I wrote out the statement, people consoled one another, and conversation turned to how this, at least, would be a way we could communicate our struggle to the family of the victim—let them know that we had not accepted the demonized portrait the defense painted of him but, rather, that we found ourselves bound by the strictures of the law. We could tell them that we were not unsympathetic toward their plea for justice.

I read the statement aloud one last time to the room before I buzzed for the bailiff. Again no one objected. The bailiff came, and he took the sheet from my hand.

And we waited.

In the half-hour it took for the court to assemble, our mournful solemnity gradually brightened into the camaraderie of a parting of the ways. Laughter broke here and there, as the idea that it was over began to sink in. People started exchanging business cards, and someone had the idea that we ought to circulate an address sheet and then get it copied, so we would all be able to stay in touch. A piece of paper made its way around the room, and someone buzzed for the bailiff, asking if he would make us twelve copies. He took the sheet and said he would, and as he left he said that we ought to prepare ourselves because the court was almost ready, and it looked as if we would each need to be ready to speak. That was all he said, and he shut the door behind him.

This caused a tremor of anxiety. We would all need to speak? About what? Surely this had something to do with our note to the court. What would the judge do? The feeling of solidarity had become too strong, however, for these thoughts to cause much concern. In fact, it felt very much as if part of the new spirit of unity among us proceeded directly from the mischievous sense that we had, together, done something that stretched the rules, that we had found a way to talk back to a judge (in particular) and to the system (in general) so set on restricting our voices over the last weeks. Dean joked that he was looking forward to a chance to speak his mind in the open court. Several others took courage.

Then the call came. Thomas Mackelwee appeared, and asked if I had filled out the verdict sheet (the formal document with the list of charges and a double column of boxes to check—guilty/not guilty), and I said I had. It was in my pocket. We entered the courtroom.

After we had taken our seats, the judge spoke. “Mr. Burnett, I have your note here, and I am going to read it to the court.” He did so strangely, without the least trace of inflection, slowly, mechanically, pausing momentarily after each word as if to strip the sentences of meaning:

“ ‘We the jury wish it to be known to the open court that we feel most strongly that the strict application of the law to the facts established by the evidence in this case does not lead to a truly just verdict. We have, however, reached a verdict in accordance with our charge.'

“Have I read that correctly, Mr. Burnett?”

I said he had.

“According to our legal system,” he continued, “a verdict must be in accordance with the law and it must be true. Do you understand that, Mr. Burnett?”

I said I did.

“I want you to answer this question, Mr. Burnett, by saying yes or no, nothing more. Has the jury reached a verdict?”

I said yes.

The judge turned to Thomas Mackelwee, the associate clerk of count, and asked him to begin. He approached me, requested the verdict sheet, and took it to the podium. In response to the judge's prompting questions, the clerk announced, charge by charge, what we had found.

“On the charge of murder in the second degree with intent, how finds the jury?”

“Not guilty.”

I looked at Milcray, whose head was resting against his hands, clasped in front of him, his elbows on the table. His head dropped when the answer came.

“On the charge of murder in the second degree under the theory of depraved indifference, how finds the jury?”

“Not guilty.”

His head dropped farther, and a distinct wailing went up from the back of the room.

“On the charge of manslaughter, how finds the jury?”

“Not guilty.”

And Milcray looked straight up, with tears streaming down his face, and his fists clenched in the air before his throat.

The wailing from the back of the room grew louder.

The defense attorney showed no emotion; the prosecutors sat impassive.

I could hear sobbing in the jury box behind me and to my left. The judge spoke more words, the clerk spoke more words. I was asked a question. Was this the verdict of the jury. . . ?

I said it was, aware that the moment was collapsing for me, that I was not able to maintain any distance from what was happening, that I was no longer seeing what was going on.

The attorneys approached the bench for a conference, and we were told that the jury would be polled. Each of us would be asked to affirm the verdict individually. Did I speak? I do not remember. In my mind I hear Leah, to my left. She answered the question clearly: yes, this was her verdict. Then Jim. Yes. He spoke shortly, without a trace of hesitation. Then Jessica. Yes.

And so it went. I watched Milcray, who had again frozen in a posture of silent expectation, his head against his hands, which were again clasped in front of him, his elbows propped on the table edge. The tears were visible, dripping down his nose onto the table. His head again dropped, slightly, each time an answer came: Yes. Yes.

Once Adelle, behind me, had spoken, the thing felt done. But five answers remained. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

And it was over. We had let him go.

 

T
he judge addressed us briefly. He thanked us for our work, but not effusively. Rather, it was a backhanded thanks, which began by pointing out that in peacetime jury duty constituted the most extensive commitment demanded of citizens. It was a service to the country, he acknowledged, but it was by no means a service comparable in scope to that which had been demanded of the men of his generation, many of whom had been asked to give up not a few weeks, but years, and in too many cases had given up their very lives. We were to be thanked for what we had done. But we ought not leave with a disproportionate sense of the service we had rendered to the republic. Good day.

He was right. I felt, dimly, a new respect for him, a sympathy for his perpetual irritation with the parade of self-indulgent New Yorkers who passed under his bench.

As I stood to let fellow jurors file out in front of me, my eyes fell on the prosecutors. My instinct was to avert my gaze, out of a sense of decorum, not wishing them to see me looking on at their defeat. But at the same moment I realized that my wandering eyes might be interpreted as an unwillingness to look them in the face, as a sign of some uneasiness with the thing we had just done. This would not do. So I made full eye contact, and held it. No sooner had I done so than my initial hesitation blossomed unexpectedly into icy
Schadenfreude,
a feeling of euphoria, a delight at their failure. It had all failed—the mocking tone, the histrionics with the knife, the obsequies and sarcasm. I turned and followed the others out the door.

Back in the deliberation room, hasty promises bounced back and forth as people scrambled to collect their things: we would meet up again; a reunion, perhaps; let's stay in touch. The sense of exhilaration had not subsided, but neither had people's urgency to walk free from the whole affair. Walking free had taken on a new meaning for all of us. The sergeant stuck his head in without warning: we were free to go, but we had a last decision to make. We could go out the front (walking down the public hall to the public elevators), or out the back, where we would be escorted by a court officer, and would be assured of avoiding anyone who had been in the court. Also, those who wished could talk with the lawyers, who often stayed around and were sometimes interested in hearing from jurors.

We split on this, four or five of us deciding to walk out the front, and the rest preferring to go the other way. For my part, I had no desire to speak with anyone, but I never wanted to wonder if I had taken the back way because of some uneasiness about facing the family of the victim. They—the brothers, sisters, a pastor, and a set of friends and supporters—had been present for every moment of the weeks of testimony, lining their bench each time we emerged from our deliberations, showing us their lengthening faces. I could well imagine what was going on in their heads each time we requested more evidence, or sought clarification on some quibbling specificity of the legal language in the charge. They must have thought the world had gone crazy: there lay the knife; there was the man who had swung it; what more could we possibly need?