“ALL RISE.” the Bailiff shouted.
We all stood respectfully as the judge entered the room, draped in a grand black gown, and sat down in a large, cushioned chair. She said something that I don’t recall, then glanced toward the papers on her bench.
I looked into the pews. I saw a young Black girl, no older than 16, watching nervously. She had glasses, long dark hair, and a purple t-shirt with sparkly writing on it. She was swaying back and forth. Alone.
The clerk began reading: “The jury has completed their deliberations and has come to a verdict. On the charge of assault and battery with a deadly weapon, the verdict is guilty. On the charge of …”
As the clerk read the charges, I heard a loud sob to my right. I could see the girl’s shoulders shaking uncontrollably as she cried. She continued swaying back and forth. Back and forth.
We, the jury, had found the defendant guilty on all charges. The room fell silent.
The thing nobody tells you about jury duty is how unpredictable it is. It may be a well-oiled machine from the judge’s perspective, but for the jurors, each step is a surprise.
The defense attorney broke the silence. “Objection your honor, the defense would like to poll the jury.”
We, the jurors, looked toward each other in quiet confusion. None of us knew what this meant, but the judge granted their objection and explained that each of us would have to stand and confirm our verdict.
“Juror number one, was this your verdict?”
“Yes.”
“Juror number two, was this your verdict?”
“Yes.”
This continued until it reached me. I think I was juror number 10. I stood up and turned toward the judge.
As I stood, I locked eyes with the defendant, a young Black man in his late twenties. He was wearing a black suit, a crisp white shirt, and black tie. Throughout the trial, he had been slouching in his chair. This wasn’t out of laziness; instead, it allowed his shirt collar to obscure his neck, which was covered in tattoos. I had read about this before. Lawyers often try to present their clients as clean-cut to avoid prejudicing any jurors against them for their appearance. Now, he was sitting up a bit straighter. I saw his eyes. They weren’t angry. They weren’t sad. They were simply resigned.
He wasn’t even a decade older than me. I was 18 at the time. I had never voted. But I was sitting on this jury, helping decide the fate of this young man in front of me.
“Juror number 10, was this your verdict?”
I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t want to stand there any longer. I didn’t want to feel the room’s gaze.
“Yes.”
As we sat back into our seats, the judge gave us our second surprise: The defendant was a prior felon. This meant we would have to go back upstairs and reconsider a fourth charge — felon in possession of a firearm.
We were all caught off guard, but we returned to the jury room to confer.
It was a small room for 12 people. There was a bathroom, a few armchairs around the edge, and a large rectangular table with 12 chairs. We had no phones, nothing besides paper and a description of the key aspects of the law that had to be broken to meet the requirements for a conviction.
During the arguments and presentation of evidence, we weren’t allowed to take notes. That meant, with the exception of a few pictures and some 911 call transcripts, nearly the entire testimony we had heard was based completely off of memory.
If we wanted to communicate or ask questions, the foreman of the jury would write the question on a note, and press a button on the wall. The clerk would then come to receive the note, and we would wait for a written response from the judge.
We also had a specially designed legal dictionary. The first pages would summarize the law in question. It looked something like this:
Then, there was a legal dictionary, with definitions such as:
Assault: An assault is any willful and unlawful attempt or offer to do a bodily hurt to another with force or violence.
Battery: A battery is any willful and unlawful use of force or violence upon the person of another.
We decided on three charges earlier that day after finishing oral arguments early in the morning. The specifics of the deliberations are unimportant. It was intense. I was the second-to-last holdout on the case because of one question: whether the discharge of the weapon was “willful” or not. It came down to my experience firing a revolver. The first shot is easy when the hammer is cocked. The second shot, without cocking the hammer, is incredibly hard to discharge. This experience informed my decision to join the majority.
We came to that verdict at around 7 p.m.
It was around 7:20 p.m. when we returned to the jury room to make our fourth verdict. We came to a decision quickly.
We walked back down the stairs around 7:40 p.m. We went down our rows, sat in our assigned seats again. The process was fast. The young girl was gone.
The second shock came down like a hammer, at least for me. The judge informed us that we would be responsible for deciding the sentences of the defendant, and began reading out the sentencing guidelines. I felt sick as I realized the decision we would have to make. Because he was a prior felon, the terms were increased enormously. I believe two of the charges ranged from four years to a life sentence.
We walked back up the stairs. I sat down in one of the chairs on the side of the room. We were all quiet for a few moments, taking our time to process the magnitude of the decision we were about to make. I had guessed we might have to decide his term, but I never expected the numbers to be so high.
I did my best to lower the sentence as much as I could. Several people expressed concerns about retribution. Somebody noted the crime had happened just within a mile of where they lived. Others expressed concerns that if the defendant was released too early, they would come back and find them because he knew our names and faces. These concerns were amplified by gang involvement in the case.
Whether or not these concerns were valid, they were present. I argued strongly for shorter sentences and got them lowered significantly. But the final number came out to a total of 36 years.
We came down one more time for the judge to announce our sentencing decision. The defendant wasn’t present because he was not required to stay for the sentencing. When the judge finished, we all got up and exited our rows. Then we exited the courtroom.
As we left as a group, we passed by the prosecution, who were chatting and smiling near the door. They thanked us for our service as we left. They had won. We helped them. They were happy. None of us were.
The next day, I saw a headline pop-up in my feed. Jeffrey Epstein’s wife, Ghislaine Maxwell, had been convicted of helping Epstein sexually abuse young girls. Her sentence was 20 years — 16 years fewer than the defendant I had helped put away just a day before. It was a sickening comparison. A woman who had assisted and participated in sex trafficking and pedophilia for decades, who had exploited hundreds of women and girls with her wealth, was given a lighter punishment than a kid who made, comparably, a few bad choices. It was wrong.
This isn’t the image of a jury most imagine. They think of flashy moments with crowds watching as lawyers battle. They don’t think of the reality of a case: an empty room with a judge, a few lawyers, a jury, and a young girl crying alone as her brother gets sent to jail for nearly the rest of his life. She was alone. She probably didn’t have anyone else. Even sadder, he only had one person there who cared. Did he have a family? Parents? Friends? I don’t know.
All I know is that all I saw was pain. The pain of the defendant losing the rest of his life. The pain of a defense lawyer, who knows there is nothing he can do to help this client, but has to fight as hard as they can to give that person a proper defense. The numbness that the judge and prosecution must feel after years of doing this. What that does to a person is unimaginable.
But I know what it did to me. I saw the years before this man’s life, the many points that somebody could have intervened and helped. I saw that what he did was wrong, and that he was wrong, but I also saw opportunity. What if this man had gained some support when he was in highschool? What if somebody had stopped him from joining a gang? What if somebody had intervened? Or maybe they did help him, and this was inevitable. I will never know.
Staff Director
