I was on jury duty three times in my relatively short life as an adult (not quite thirty) and was on a jury twice. One was a relatively quick drug case, involving an undercover agent trying to get people to buy drugs. The office was a bit quick in one case in our opinion, thus the sale was not completed legally. Of special notice was a middle aged white mom type being the defendant's biggest defender. The second time was a very troubling (in many ways, including lack of enough evidence and testimony) incest case, which led to a multiday sequestration until finally a hung jury was declared. Of special notice was one of the jurors saying she too was molested by a family member, which she apparently did not feel made her unfit to be a juror in this case. At any rate, though our jury did not do the best of jobs deliberating at times, I agree in serious cases such as this one with the opinions held by the below editorial. Sending people home while they deliberate might best be used in certain civil cases, though one worries that it might drag already too long cases even longer. In general, forcing jurors to decide or not go home would help them to get down to business. The only problem might be that in some cases serious deliberation might not occur because people want to go home, a valid concern, but remember even with no sequestration, they still would have day long stints in court. June 16, 2001
Sequestered, a Jury Understands Its Duty By D. GRAHAM BURNETT
There are brighter faces in New York State criminal courts these days in the jury boxes, at least. With the abolition last month of the mandatory sequestering of all juries deliberating criminal cases, there will be less shuttling to hotels and fewer restless nights under the eye of watchful guards. This may be good. But when I passed through the metal detectors at 100 Centre Street for jury duty in Manhattan last year, I had no idea of the role sequestration could play in a verdict.
We were a diverse lot: a pair of professors, a computer-game developer, a restaurant manager, a vacuum- cleaner repairman; black, white, Hispanic. In the end, 12 of us would spend four days totally sequestered sleeping at outlying hotels, able to pass only short notes to the outside world via our guards as we struggled to agree on what happened in a tiny West Village apartment on an August night in 1998. There, a young man stabbed another man 25 times, leaving him bleeding to death on the floor. Was it murder?
For 23 hours we wrangled over this question in a tiny, bare room. We pored over crime-scene photos. We tried to re-enact the crime. Half a day would pass in respectful discussion; then came fights, tears, curses, silence. But no consensus. Two men had gone into a room; one had came out, and he claimed self-defense. How could we say what had happened?
But we had something else to think about. In addition to all the emotion and the evidence the DNA, the phone records, the blood on the wall there was the simple matter of our charge: to apply the law. And the law says that when someone claims to have acted in self-defense, the state must show beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not do so. There lay our very limited task.
We did not agree. I was foreman, and I secretly believed the case insoluble. I hoped we could hold out for a hung jury. But the judge gave no sign of relenting. As days wore on, the crushing weight of our seclusion and confinement reduced us to tearful unanimity. But not before one of us was rushed to the hospital, collapsing under the strain and another made a somewhat half-hearted attempt to escape and had to be herded back by the sergeant-at-arms. A third, nearly hysterical, tried to reach her lawyer to find out if she could press for her own release. Marched before the merciless eye of the judge, she was given a frightening dressing-down.
On what would be the last full day of the ordeal, someone took the courage to mumble, as we were marched by the bench on our way back to the jury room, "We are the prisoners now!"
How true it seemed. And that may have helped us finally reach a verdict. For days, we had fought over the burden of proof. It was absurdly high, some said. How could the state ever win? Ultimately, though, we acquitted the defendant of all charges. We were not sure he was innocent, but we were not sure he was guilty, either, and having tasted the state's power during our confinement, we understood in a new way why the burden of proof was so heavy. Sequestration was, for us, a powerful civics lesson.
D. Graham Burnett is the author of the forthcoming "A Trial by Jury."