I push past hot-dog carts and curbside vendors into the Criminal Court Building, where a scruffy handwritten sign directs women to the left, men to the right, through metal detectors and X-ray machines and periodic friskings. Other signs prohibit things like magic markers and “seriously short shorts.”
In the hall we are lined up in twos like in grade school. The guard escorting us to the courtroom has an Elvis hair helmet, plastic-pink cheeks, and thick-lensed glasses that magnify her grape eye shadow. We are marched into an ancient courtroom, where the judge tells us the trial involves charges of murder and attempted murder. After the attorneys and the 15-year-old defendant stand and greet us, the judge gives us endless dry instructions about murder and criminal trials and reasonable doubt. Then 12 are called up into the jury box, where the seats are wonderfully worn out and comfortable and squeaky. The first woman called is a clerk, says her husband’s a technician for Zenith. The judge asks her chatty questions about herself, her family. Then he reads a blur of instructions in legalese. The woman nods timidly. When he asks, “If you feel that the burden of guilt has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt, what will your verdict be?” she blushes, hesitates, stumbles off automatic. The judge kindly offers to read the question again. “Any hobbies?” he asks at the wrap. “Sewing?” She says it like a question. “Um, and exercise, though it doesn’t show.”
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A woman to the right is testy. She’s Asian and speaks broken English. When the judge asks, reading from her card, “You work at home? You’re a homemaker?” she barks, “Yes, my husband had stay home from work today so I come here.” But when the judge reads the ages of her children from her summons, they’re mostly in their 30s. When he asks about her ability to be impartial, she snaps, “I don’t know.” Answers all his questions fiercely. “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Suddenly she says, “I’m confused and scared right now.” The judge smiles, saying there’s nothing to be afraid of. While the attorneys and judge confer, I lean over to her. “Have you never done this before?”
“We got bounced,” I tell her.
“In 1960,” he announces.
“OK, ma’am, you are excused,” the judge says quickly. She is thorough and gentle, compassionate with crime victims, and patient with one flustered woman who raises her hand to indicate she cannot serve but has no specifics as to why. Just doesn’t think she can. She keeps stammering something about only coming here to “honor, to honor my, to honor the thing I got in the mail.”
Later she tells the judge her husband is going in for surgery tomorrow and she wants to be with him. The judge instantly dismisses her, reassures her as the woman repeats that she came to honor her thing in the mail. “That’s all right. I understand,” the judge told her. “Go be with your husband and I hope all goes well.”
