Trial by jury? It doesn’t seem to work anymore

In the last courtroom in which I sat as a potential juror, huge brass letters stretching across the front wall spelled out the words “In God We Trust.”

How should we interpret that statement in a court of law? Are we to assume that God will somehow reveal to jurors what is true and what is false in the testimony they hear, and that he will make sure that jurors reach the correct verdict?

I wish that were true, because my experiences as a juror made clear to me a very serious flaw in the jury system: The ability of prospective jurors to hide — and lie about — their biases and preconceived ideas.

The first trial on which I sat as a juror, in the early 1970s, was a civil trial concerning a car accident that had occurred more than six years earlier. A middle-aged woman whose car had been rear-ended by a car driven by a teenager maintained that, as the result of the collision, she had experienced whiplash, and she was suing the driver for pain and suffering.

The driver insisted that his car had barely touched her rear bumper. The person testifying for the woman was an elderly doctor who seemed quite unsure of himself. He spoke hesitantly, and at one point, all the paperwork he had been holding slipped out of his hands and scattered on the floor.

The person testifying for the young man was a fast-talking, much younger doctor who radiated overweening self-regard and who, when asked if he was getting paid for his testimony, laughingly said, “Yes, keep talking. I’m paid by the hour.”

It seemed to me that determining who was at fault was virtually impossible, not least because we were shown no photographs and thus could not see the extent of the damage to the cars.

When we started to deliberate, I was taken aback when another juror declared that she was sick and tired of people always blaming teenagers for any mishap, no matter what the circumstances — a prejudice that she had not revealed during the voir dire, when lawyers for both sides try to ascertain whether prospective jurors can weigh the evidence objectively.

Even more distressing was my experience some two decades later as a juror in a criminal trial involving what is known as a “buy and bust” — a police officer in plain clothes buys drugs from someone on the street, and pays for them with marked bills. Another officer then arrests the seller, the marked bills serving as proof of guilt.

Although by then I had come to question the wisdom of laws regarding illicit drugs, I felt that I had to do my duty as a citizen and hold drug sellers responsible for breaking the law. Nobody who testified led me to question what had occurred in the case being tried.

After the 12 jurors and the alternate juror sat down in a small room outside the courtroom to begin deliberating, nine of us voted to convict. The forewoman, though, declared that she intended to find the defendant innocent, because, she said, “The police always lie,” whereupon two other jurors piped up to agree with her.

I was shocked — outraged — that the three had lied during the voir dire. But I did not inform the judge that he had to declare a mistrial, because doing so would have resulted in a whole new trial, at a great cost in time and money.

The discussion that followed quickly turned nasty. Hours of shouting ensued.

The judge, the defendant and his lawyer, and the state’s attorney remained in the courtroom that entire time and undoubtedly heard the fracas.

For some inexplicable reason, late on the third day an officer of the court entered the jury room and told the alternate juror that his services were no longer needed. The next morning, as soon as we all took our seats, the forewoman announced that — totally illegally — she had telephoned the alternate juror the night before to ask him how he would have voted if he had had the opportunity to do so, and he said he believed the defendant to be guilty.

“I’m voting guilty,” the forewoman now declared, whereupon the two other holdouts voted to convict. Their behavior was a travesty of jury service.

As we wait for the 45th president — the likely 2024 GOP presidential candidate — to stand trial for his numerous criminal acts, many of us harbor serious misgivings about whether all the jurors in each of those trials will listen attentively to both sides, and base their decisions solely on the evidence presented.

I think it is not far-fetched to say that the fate of our democracy may hang in the balance. So it is very tempting to trust that God will imbue the jurors with impregnable objectivity.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We are reprinting this Point of View because a version of this that published in the Nov. 23 edition inadvertently left out several key sentences that are being included in this version.