The View From a Juror's Chair nytimes.com
Right, Karen. To atone for that little 4 post grubfest, I will point out this article which may be of interest to you. There's even a literary angle for the local book discussion topic. Somewhere deep in the story we get to Juror 9:
Juror 9 was a big man: a 6-foot-3-inch God-fearing veteran of the United States Armed Forces who now repaired vacuum cleaners for a living. When I first noticed him, in the early days of jury selection, he was spitting tobacco juice behind the radiator by the elevator during a break. He had thin brown hair slicked back and a manly mustache, and wore a weathered pair of work boots. A contractor of some sort, I assumed, and I pegged him, without much thought or interest, a prime example of Susan Faludi's tragic tale of the white working-class male -- big chest, big gut, big debt. I called him, irreverently, ''the Faludiman'' in my diary. What did I know? Before the trial ended he had blown my stereotype (indeed, any stereotype) wide open.
From the start of the trial, I thought it very likely he would take the lead in pushing for a guilty verdict, if not a hanging. I think I figured anyone wearing, apparently in earnest, a large belt buckle reading ''Rodeo'' had to be a law-and-order type and quite possibly a bigot too.
But at breakfast on the second day (at the hotel out by J.F.K. Airport where we had been sequestered), we got into a conversation, at first about the food, then about fasting, then about the approach of Lent and finally about the Good Lord. In addition to telling us about his victory over drugs, he began to explain that he had become a domestic missionary of his California ''mother church'' (of recovered addicts), part of a small cell charged to found a new community in Spanish Harlem. Almost a decade had passed since this group took up residence in the community and began pursuing its mission: wandering in and out of the heroin galleries and the crack dens of the neighborhood, handing out literature, praising the Lord, preaching the possibility of recovery and redemption. They held their first meetings in an empty storefront and circled in prayer around vomiting addicts delirious from the struggle to go cold turkey. The church now had well over 100 families, and Juror 9 had become one of its leaders, a deacon sometimes called upon to preach. He had married into the community, and he and his Guatemalan wife had two kids of their own; they were also rearing his daughter from a previous marriage.
A bit later, we hit my rather obscure literary allusion:
Then Juror 9 rose to speak. ''I've been listening,'' he began, ''to these things people are saying, and I have tried to pray about all this. Now I've decided what I have to do. I believe this young man did something very, very wrong in that room. But I also believe that nobody has asked me to play God. I've been asked to apply the law. Justice belongs to God; men only have the law. Justice is perfect, but the law can only be careful.''
This takes us to renowned but obscure author William Gaddis, who started off his 1994 novel "A Frolic of His Own" with a more concise and sardonic version of the above::
“Justice? -- You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”
That was cribbed from gaddisannotations.net , though I got the book laying around somewhere from some library booksale. Anyway, the article was quite interesting, but off hand, I'd say the jury was quite unusual in terms of the intellectual depth and breadth of the jurors. A rather dramatic rendering, complete with last paragraph kicker. |
