A Jury to Decide (Part 2)
A Jury to Decide (Part 3)
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As a feminist, a rape trial is among the most difficult of trials to judge. There is a part of me, nagging in my hind brain, that says "Rape is rape" and it tells me that every allegation she makes deserves to be met with the utmost seriousness and punishment by the law.
But there's another part of me, part scientist, part democratic republican, that says "Wait. Wait until all the facts are in. Wait until the sate has proves him guilty. He is innocent, he must be innocent, until he is proven beyond reasonable doubt that he is guilty. So wait."
I remember on the first day of trial, I showed up in my nicest pair of blue jeans and a dress top, hoping I'd get picked so that I could serve and be done. The courthouse was easy enough to navigate. All I had to do was act lost (not hard, seeing as I really did have no clue as to where I was going) and ask a security guard where jurors were supposed to report to. Looking back, I'm only half-ashamed of my lost puppy act.
I found my way to a public lounge where a large crowd (large for inside a building, anyway) was milling about. The looks on their faces ranged from faintly bored to mildly annoyed and possibly overtly inconvenienced. After checking in, I found myself mirroring the facial expressions of those around me. It was a long wait.
Eventually we were led to a cold courtroom. When I say cold, I don't mean barren with an atmosphere of despair or hopelessness. It actually appeared inviting (in as much as those words can apply to wooden pews and short red carpet). I mean cold as in the judge turned the thermostat as low as it could go and still wished it could be colder. Yeah. I spent the rest of my jury duty in pants and long sleeves in the middle of summer.
Numbers were pulled from a hat and names were called to come forward, including mine. We took seats and were then questioned by the judge and lawyers, both prosecutor and defense, in a process known as voire dire. During this process, a large group of potential jurors (27 in my case) are apprised of the overarching themes and conditions of the case at hand and are asked questions about their backgrounds and philosophies that may pertain to aspects of the case or influence a juror's interpretation,and therefore the final verdict. Having a lawyer for a father, I've seen voire dire done before. Not only him and the lawyer he was up against, but also the famous trial lawyer Jerry Spence, who has handled and won some of the most public cases in the late 20th and early 21st century. I've seen the best in action and let me tell you, these were not the best. The prosecution was soft spoken and sometimes hard to here. Going first is never fun, but the lawyer we shall refer to as Mr. Mills did not connect with the jury as he should have. He briefed us of the case, but focused the majority of his questioning on the potential jurors who worried him most, those who, if left on the jury, might hold a grudge against the state or divulge details of the case to others during the trial. While this strategy may have helped him in selecting jurors to release, it set him up as a long-winded, detail oriented, quiet speaker who would need to work hard to grab the jury's attention.
The defense attorney we could call Mr. Paulsen however, connected with the potential jury and methodically worked his way through each of the 27 potential jurors, asking each a question or 2 before turning his attention to the next. He was humble and used his life experience to relate the case and, specifically, any issues a potential juror would have with this case as if he truly did care about the juror's comfort with this trial. After voire dire, the lawyers are allowed preferential selection.
Out of the 27 potential jurors, each lawyer is allowed to eliminate 7, leaving only 13 jurors. Jurors who are selected for elimination are not necessarily dishonest or lacking in credibility, but they are the ones that have had some sort of life experience that could influence their decision. I was, however, was not one of those eliminated. Instead of having an attorney as a father calling into question my potential stance on the case, it actually solidified the lawyers' opinions of me that I would make a fair and unbiased judge of the facts that were to be presented. Of the 13 jurors selected, 10 were women. Clearly, this was going to be a case of pathos (or for the non-English majors out there, the use of emotion as a tool of persuasion).
This whole process of jury selection took until about 11:30, roughly 2 and 1/2 hours of questioning, of talking, of listening, and of hurrying up just to wait again. Because it was not quite lunch time, the judge allowed opening statements to be read. Keeping in mind opening statements tend to take about 30 minutes each, we were well into the lunch hour before we finished. That was unfortunate as I had forgotten to eat breakfast that morning.
Tangential aside, opening statements is where the jurors find out the premise of the case. Prosecution always goes first and lays out what they have to prove. Mr. Mills, as factual as always, did exactly that. It was a textbook example of an opening statement that accused the defendant, who we shall call Fred Jensen, of the following: 1) Terroristic threats, defined as a threat to commit a crime of violence either by intentionally conveying the threat to the victim or by acting in reckless disregard to the victim's demeanor, 2) Kidnapping, defined as either abducting a person or, having abducted the person, restrains them with the intent to terrorize, 3) 1st degree sexual assault, defined as subjecting a person to sexual penetration without consent or doing so knowing that the person is either physically or mentally incapacitated to withhold consent, and 4) use of a deadly weapon to commit a felony, defined as using a knife (in this case) to commit one of the above felonies. Within all this legal jargon, I could tell that this case was going to have some incredibly serious consequences, whatever the outcome. I was nervous.
Mr. Mills was nothing if not honest. He came right out and said, "There were no witnesses to these crimes. At the bottom of this case, it is her word against his. Mr. Jensen is going to claim consent." As soon as he said this, my innards scoffed. Of course he was going to use consent. They always do. It's easy and nobody can actually "prove" otherwise. But we'll get to that later.
When Mr. Paulsen stood up to give his opening statement, it was very different from what I expected. Instead of stating the prosecution's error in charging his client, instead of intending to prove his client's innocence, his statement was simple. "The burden to prove any aspect of this case rests on the prosecution," he stated. "At no point during the course of this trial does the burden switch to the defense. Innocence until guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt is one of the most wonderful thing about our system. The defense is always innocent during the trial and he remains that way until the jury unanimously decides that he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and must therefore be convicted. Even in deliberations is he innocence. He does not become guilty until those last moments if the jury finds him so." And that made me think. During the course of the prosecution's opening statement, as blunt and factual as it was, I kept thinking, "How could he have done this? Why did he do it? What kind of person kidnaps, threatens, and rapes a girl, and then gets up there and says 'it was all consensual'?" At Paulsen's statement, I realized that my thinking was very, VERY wrong. Undemocratically so. I should not have been so easily swayed by the opening statements of the prosecution. If anything, I should've been skeptical and ruthless in my analysis.
I have never been so aware of my human fallibility, of how easily I could be persuaded by mere words.
