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When I'm not mapping out towns or political schemes for Alphistia, I'm an ordinary American citizen, albeit reluctantly. I pay my taxes, have been known to vote for tweedledee or tweedledum, and as a result have ended up in the great big jury computer that churns out jury duty notices by the hundreds of thousands each year in my home state of New York.
Several years ago I got the panic-inducing notice to serve on a grand jury. I work an odd schedule, and as a result my employer was promising to be less than flexible in scaling back my hours while I was on a grand jury.From what I knew about the grand jury, I'd already concluded it was the most idiotic of all the types of juries. I'd have to sit on a wooden bench for 3 hours a day for 4 weeks and issue indictments, and then more or less work my regular 40 hour week. Needless to say I was not very happy about this.
After postponing the inevitable five separate times, I was more or less delivered a computer-produced ultimatum. So on a sultry July morning, I went down to "the Tombs", the cleverly named combination jail and courthouse in lower Manhattan.
If I wasn't in such a grumpy mood, I might've noticed that the Tombs is actually a very interesting art-deco building, although badly maintained and remodeled through the years to be thoroughly dehumanizing. Some of the original brass fixtures and wood paneling still exist, although I'd bet none of these have been cleaned since the early sixties.
After a minimum of bureaucratic shenanigans, I was selected. Recently it seems, the jury officers realized finally that things needed to change a bit. People were getting mighty frustrated with the traditional bureaucratic nightmares of jury duty and were doing just about anything not to show up or to get out of serving altogether.So some reforms were instituted. Anyway, I was chosen almost immediately to serve on a morning jury. That was it for day one.
Next morning, I was back at the Tombs at 9:30 in the morning. After a soporific recitation of the legalistic aspects of being on a grand jury...we began hearing cases. The first one was a typical case: a low-level drug dealer had been arrested by an undercover team of cops. The defendant was not in the courtroom, nor was a defense attorney, nor was a judge. There was only an assistant district attorney, who presented the basics of the case, interviewed one or more of the arresting officers, and then put the matter in the hands of the grand jury. During the following four weeks, the grand jury I was on voted on more than 100 of these cases. Only once did we vote to dismiss the charges, which greatly upset the assistant d.a. assigned to the case. It's that rare!
I knew when I first got the grand jury notice that the whole procedure was simply a tool for a prosecutor to bring a case to trial.There was nothing "grand " about it. In some states, grand juries have been abolished or are used extremely rarely. New York state in its infinite wisdom has one of the largest and most cumbersome grand jury systems in the country. Just my luck to live in a state where someone accused of having a small stash of pot must not only be prosecuted to begin with,but is sent through the whole rigamarole of a grand jury. (let it be noted that I almost always voted against prosecuting these small-time drug-users, but grand juries can send a case to trial without a unanimous vote.)
There have been proposals to abolish grand juries in New York state, but the vested interests have blocked that. Prosecutors LOVE grand juries, because the members almost always do as they're told, and prosecutors have all the power. In states that don't have grand juries anymore, a judge decides whether a case merits being tried. That's not undemocratic: judges are experts on the law and we PAY them to JUDGE!
The fact that only one case was dismissed by us jurors was probably because we didn't know any better. Prosecutors love juror ignorance, and the procedures or grand jury hearings are so arcane and so formulaic, the jurors just rubber stamp the accusations presented by the prosecutors, out of bored numbness than for any other reason.
Unfortunately, New York is not about to abolish grand juries, although it came close once in the late eighties. The head of the committee investigating the usefulness of grand juries commented: "a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich if a prosecutor asked it to". Ironically he himself was indicted by a grand jury a few years later after he had stalked an ex-mistress and threatened to kill her...
Grand juries are part of the inherited system of jurisprudence that was developed during medieval times in England. The idea of voting an indictment or reaching a verdict by a jury of one's peers in itself wasn't a bad idea 500 or 600 years ago. After all, trial by ordeal was the system in use before that, so a jury was an improvement on the arbitrariness of the state.
But the OJ trial, and the Rodney King verdict that sparked massive riots, show in a high profile way what trial by jury has become in the US: a game at best, a farce at worst.These are "trials by ordeal" of a new kind altogether! Perhaps the great contribution of American civilization: showmanship, is far more important than justice. Jury trials make good tv shows and movies, but is that right and just?
The jury has never been part of the justice systems in most non-English speaking countries. And we're told in school and during patriotic blatherfests that somehow our Anglo-Saxon tradition of juries makes us freer. The simple fact is that other democracies can operate fair and free justice systems without juries, and there's no great crying out in the Netherlands for example, or Israel, or Denmark or almost any other country to introduce juries. And remarkably enough, or perhaps it's not such a surprise after all...but the OTHER Anglo-Saxon countries have nearly abolished juries since World War II. In Great Britain, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, jury trials are nearly extinct except in the most serious cases. Grand juries are seen just as a tool of an overly powerful state and not necessary.
Bill Clinton's impeachment couldn't have occurred if grand juries were abolished. He was impeached for the heinous crime of lying in a deposition that was part of a grand jury hearing. The only reason that grand jury was convened was as part of the hugely manipulative scheme by a gang of right-wing extremists to use the American justice system to try to impose their own desired outcome (to get rid of Clinton) against the will of the majority of the country's citizens.
Within two years, the computer will issue another grand jury notice to me. I live in Manhattan, the most litigious few square miles in a hugely litigious country. I'll postpone as long as I can, and then take my jaundiced eye back down to the Tombs to witness another four weeks of this travesty of justice.
(January 30, 1999)
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