When I lived in St, Louis Missouri, my registration as a voter enabled the city to call on me as a juror in criminal trials. I would report as required and sit through voir dire, the “examination of witnesses or jurors by a judge or counsel.” I was accepted and seated on two juries. On one occasion, the judge dismissed the seated jury, saying that the defendant, having seen the humans massed before him, had opted for a plea agreement. Another time, I was seated on the jury in the trial of a young man, the nature of whose transgression I cannot remember.
Memories of my own experience with the jury trial system were triggered by viewing reports of a jury in Minnesota considering evidence in a murder trial. Reporters often noted that “jurors were furiously scribbling notes.” In the three occasions that I had to engage in the jury process, we potential jurors were all told that, under no circumstances were we to take notes, and in the trial that went to judgment, we had to throw our cellphones into a basket upon entering the jury box. At the end of each day’s deliberations, we had fun unscrambling the pile, looking for our phones.
When the prosecution and defense rested in the trial of the young man, we jurypersons retired to the jury room to deliberate and decide. We were not “Twelve Angry Men,” because we lived in an era that recognized a certain equality between men and women, but when we retired to consider whether the young man was to be acquitted or judged guilty of the crimes he had been charged with, we carefully considered each count and took a poll: guilty, or not guilty. After a while, as the guilty counts mounted in number, one of the jurors expressed some dismay. “We’re throwing the book at the kid!” the man cried out. Though I was not the jury foreperson, I took the helm, and reviewed each count with the man, asking after each whether he thought the man was innocent or guilty. After all the counts were discussed, the man — though still frustrated — agreed that we were not “throwing the book” at anyone but assessing responsibility for transgressions.
I had another occasion to be in a courtroom when sentence was pronounced against a man. In June of 2009 in St. Louis Missouri, two men burst into a bar waving guns and demanding money. One of the gunmen put two bullets into the back of my friend, Michael Dolan; the other gunman shot and killed his own companion. One of the people who had planned the robbery pled guilty and in 2011, was sentenced to 35 years in prison. I sat in the courtroom with Mike’s mother and father, and his friends from the bar where I had met him, shot pool with him, and stood with him when things got touchy in the bar. He was one of the most effusive and personable people I have known, and to this day, is well and truly missed. Mike’s mother and father testified at the sentencing, and I wept as I listened to Jeanne’s recitation of the joy her only child had given her.
The men responsible for Mike’s death were caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to various prison terms. But the trials his parents suffered, and on a lesser scale, the trial his friends went through, trying to adjust to living with a hole in the fabric of their friendships, those trials were greater than any those four bandits in St. Louis might have been subjected to.
cjon3acd@att.net