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To: Lane3 who wrote (2460)	9/16/2001 8:52:28 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 51729

On another old topic, I thought I'd point this out in case you didn't get to the lighter sections of the paper today. 'A Trial by Jury': 1 Angry Man nytimes.com This is a review of the book that that big NYT magazine article was presumably excerpted from. No sooner had they received the case than an impasse threatened to end all discussion. Burnett wanted to start, logically he thought, with a vote to see how many believed Milcray was guilty of something before considering the various charges of murder and manslaughter. Others, less eager to win the Logician of the Year award, insisted on determining what Milcray was guilty of before deciding if he was guilty of anything. A frustrated Burnett suggested they vote on how to proceed, but one of his colleagues argued that any such vote had to be unanimous. Should they now vote on whether their vote had to be unanimous? An infinite regress beckoned. ''So this is where constitutions come from,'' Burnett thought to himself. One juror persistently demanded to have almost all the testimony read back to them, an exercise that would have taken several days. Another felt they should ignore the law and consider nullification. A third suggested that ''we need a more sensual approach.'' There was shouting, there was cursing, there were tears. Someone got sick, someone else tried to sneak away. . . . Burnett reinforced the point. The prosecution's burden of proof had to be very high, he declared, because the state's power was so strong. They had all learned something about that power in recent days, he observed. ''We discovered that a man in a chair and a robe could tell us we couldn't go home, that we couldn't talk to our families, that we couldn't even talk to a lawyer. He could send us to jail. . . . We discovered that, in the end, there seemed to be no limit to the power of the state over us, once we fell into its hands.'' Thinking about the tyrannical behavior of the judge over the course of the trial, the last doubter caved. Milcray walked away a free man, but none of the jurors cheered. My one tour of duty on that front was much less philosophical, but it was a pretty minor matter.