The Conversation
I got my jury summons the week after I quit my job. It was conspicuous timing.
A little voice in my head screamed that it was meant to be, but I hate the idea of fate so I pushed it aside. I reminded myself just how unlikely it was I would actually end up on the jury. Maybe I won’t even have to report, maybe I’ll get eliminated early, maybe I won’t make it to the box, maybe one of the lawyers will decide they just don’t like my face. All very real possibilities.
As I cleared those hurdles one by one, that little voice got louder and louder, and by the time I was sitting in the seat marked Alternate #1, it was practically screaming. There’s no way, I insisted. You’re going to be here for 3 weeks listening to all the sound and the fury and never even cast a vote, and if you’d only stuck it out at work for another week you could’ve gotten paid for it. This is the universe having a hearty laugh at your literal expense.
And then, without warning, Juror #7 was dismissed. And Alternate #1 became Juror #12.
I decided then and there my new job was to pay very close attention, not just to the case but to the overall process we were undertaking. The Judiciary System is, after all, a core tenet of the American democracy and participating wasn’t just an opportunity, it was my duty to serve and serve well.
And it nearly broke me. Because…
The Jury Selection Process is Deeply Flawed
If you’ve ever seen Runaway Jury, it was most likely on sleepy afternoon on some random cable network that saw names like John Cusack, Rachel Weisz, and Gene Hackman and jumped to sign on the dotted line. You probably remember a few scenes here and there but found it overall forgettable, partially because of the incessant commercial breaks but mostly because there wasn’t enough Law and way too much Order.
The premise is simple: there’s an entire game that lawyers play when it comes to jury selection.
It’s such a big deal that they have devoted specialists to this aspect of the trial. In the movie it was Gene Hackman. In our case it was two 40-something, sharply-dressed women with a glare to match. Remember that one teacher in high school who even the other teachers seemed wary of? The one who tolerated no shenanigans but you still kind of respected? That was them. Big Minerva McGonagall energy.
They were sizing us up the moment we packed into the courtroom. But before we could even get started, the judge announced how long the trial would be — up to 4 weeks. That’s a long time.
For anyone whose job wouldn’t cover that amount of time or for whom that would create a “financial hardship”, they would get to speak to the judge about their situation and likely be excused. This knocked out about 2/3 of our 100+ prospective jurors, which immediately set off alarms.
Can we even theoretically have an impartial jury if we’re starting with the people with enough money and/or resources to not work for a month? Doesn’t that automatically favor the more “productive” side of the case? Why can’t we at least pay people minimum wage for their time to help offset that factor? Somehow it got worse.
As each lawyer took turns going down their line of questioning, some would-be jurors expressed pretty extreme views both for and against the corporation being sued. Whether they actually held those views or were trying to get out of it, it worked and they were excused.
Others who had similar but less extreme views? A go-to follow up from both sides was, “Can you set aside your personal feelings and be impartial?” A loaded question if there ever was one, and any moment of hesitation was treated like a hard ‘yes’. Impartiality seemed important in name only.
And then there was the language barrier.
To be clear, I have no issue with Americans whose second language is English. It adds much-needed texture to an otherwise bland colloquial landscape. But when we’re talking about 3–4 weeks of evidence and testimony that digs into some of the nooks and crannies of one of the most complex dialects ever conceived, you want your audience to have the capacity to understand it, no? Yet we ended up with one juror and one alternate who displayed a tenuous grasp of straightforward questions. More on that later.
There were a handful of other potential conflicts of interest that came up along the way. Some were current users of the product in question (or something similar). Some were hesitant to hear potentially graphic testimony at all. Some had served on multiple juries before and this was all old hat to them. There was even an actual lawyer in the mix.
None of it was enough to eliminate them. Even when each side had opportunities to dismiss them for no reason at all, they passed. They both had their reasons I’m sure, probably well-documented in some devious playbook on the fragile, easily-manipulated human psyche. But they both verbally agreed that they had their dirty dozen:
A former Marine. A lunchlady. A programmer. A lawyer.
A PR strategist. A college student. An office assistant. A property manager.
A concierge. A retiree. A sales rep. And me, an unemployed freelancer.
It was like something out of a movie, which I’m sure both sides were all-too aware of. And like a casting director playing a small but vital role, the two jury specialists disappeared, presumably to curate their next cast of characters.
And then the shit really hit the fan.
The Trial is Messy as Hell
My grandmother really, really wanted me to be a doctor. She would’ve settled for lawyer. After sitting through 3 weeks of a trial with a devastating medical condition at its center, I’ve never been more happy to be neither.
It all started innocently enough. The first morning, a tiny little clerk named Cheryl took roll with a smile. We marched back into the courtroom in a line and each received spiral notepads and pens with our juror numbers on them. Each lawyer gave a lengthy opening statement over a powerpoint presentation with a stylistic flair that matched their demeanor: the Plaintiff’s lawyer bore a striking resemblance to an aging, Southern Harry Potter while the Defendant’s was unmistakably the no-nonsense Hermione Granger (but with signature Weasley hair).
They each took turns telling their side of the story to us directly, painting themselves as the heroes and the other side as the villain (or unrelated casualty). They painted their strategies in broad strokes, billing their witnesses as revered experts and the opposition’s as paid shills. They flagged key facts they intended to establish and pieces of evidence that would prove them right and the other side wrong. And they reminded us over and over again the rules we were playing by: a preponderance of the evidence, or 50% and a feather.
They each got to offer a rebuttal to the others assertions, to strengthen their argument by weakening the other’s. I never understood the purpose of a debate team in school, but this back and forth made it pretty clear. No wonder so many lawyers become politicians, I thought. Debates are their specialty.
Amidst the accusations and backhanded remarks, there was a certain pleasantry, a silent acknowledgement that none of it was personal, that they were just doing their job to the best of their abilities. They politely offered to help with oversized billboards and asked permission when using each others’ materials.
Maybe it was part of an act to make us believe at heart they were good people, that we could trust them, that it was okay to be on their side. But I got the sense that when it was all said and done, they would all go out and get drinks together and applaud each others’ performances.
Then the first witness was called. And the yelling began.
There are hundreds of movies about trials. Most feature an iconic moment of truth where the down-on-their-luck plaintiff slowly breaks down a witness and gets them to make a shocking admission, nailing them to the wall and putting the jury firmly on their side. There were a few moments like that in our trial. But for each of those triumphant revelations there were a dozen cringey, deeply uncomfortable silences and a hundred loose ends left dangling.
Each lawyer walked their witnesses through carefully choreographed presentations, only to have the opposition come out swinging, attacking their argument and character with reckless abandon. They dove head-first into deeply personal accusations and dredged up statements from years past to color them liars. Pay rates were divulged, salaries discussed, any questionable decision ever made was a lightning rod for a scathing indictment. If we were in school, this was having two professors who disagreed on the subject and mercilessly dragged each others’ guest lecturers for our education.
Every now and then one lawyer would object to the other’s line of questioning, finding it to be unfair, outside the rules. So the judge would step in like a referee and make a call. Sometimes that meant a sidebar, going off into a corner to have a semi-private mini-debate over the issue. Sometimes a witness would go off on a tangent and need to be reined in (or not). They were always very deferential to the judge’s comments and rulings, which to me made his pornstache seem particularly rad.
There were also props. Lots and lots of props. The aforementioned billboards were only the beginning. There were cartoon magnets applied to said billboards and comically oversized sticky notes with illegible scribblings. There were statistical experiments with big jars of candy and old calculators that would make Doctor X proud. Printouts of each others’ presentations were defaced. Gut-wrenching photos were displayed. It really felt like a competitive classroom with millions of dollars hanging in the balance.
I took notes as diligently as I could, but as the picture became clearer and clearer they started to wane. Three weeks was a lot of information and there’s really only so much you need before you know which way you’re leaning. Once the defense finally rested, there was a palpable sense of relief from everyone, judge, jury, and lawyers alike. Closing arguments not too different from the opening ones were made by both sides were made and then it was off to the deliberation room.
Which is, of course, where the real arguments began.
No One Knows the Rules
You really get to know people in 3 weeks.
I already knew this from years of experience working at a summer camp. Spending day after day with the same handful of folks creates an unspoken bond that’s been embedded in our DNA since our tribal ancestors. It doesn’t really matter that some of these people are the last person in the world you would acknowledge on the street, much less choose to hang out with in your free time — once you’re all in the boat, you learn to get along.
Not all juries eat lunch together, but most of us did. Food options near the courthouse were limited so it was to default to their 4th floor cafeteria. Some of us started out sitting apart from the group, myself included, but one by one we eventually succumbed to the awkwardness of it and joined the group.
We weren’t allowed to talk about anything related to the trial, so instead we talked about… well, everything else.
Our food choices, our food preferences, our jobs (or lack thereof), our hobbies. We discussed how to get to court everyday, where to park, what the shortcuts are. We shared pictures of families, spouses, kids, and pets, talked about weekend plans and exchanged LA-living horror stories. We branched out to find new places to eat together, dissected the interactions of court staffers, discovered other rooms we were permitted to use. Probably.
By the end of the trial, we were cheering people on for job interviews (not mine), scoping out the hottie lawyer down the hall (not me), and making plans to come back and visit Cheryl because she’s just the best.
As we headed into the Deliberation room, we talked about who would bring what snacks and whether we could get lunch catered and work through it. We made plans to exchange information, but joked that we’d wait until after deliberations to see how we felt.
Turns out the joke was on us.
I had essentially made up my mind that ‘yes’, the corporation had directly and indirectly caused the Plaintiff’s disease and should be held financially and morally responsible. As we went around the table and shared our thoughts on the case, it was pretty obvious who did and didn’t agree. Just like the lawyers in their opening statements, we tried to be polite about it, but it didn’t last. It couldn’t. If we’d inadvertently formed a found family, the lawyers were politicians giving us something to fight about over Thanksgiving dinner.
Firmly on one side was me, the PR strategist, and the college student, all firm millennials and the youngest people in the room.
On the other, the concierge, the property manager, and the retiree. The oldest of our jury, and the last of which had questionable English.
In the center, some were leaning my way while others defaulted to the other, their way of supposedly “staying out of it”. It was both fascinating and infuriating to hear them talk about the trial we’d all sat through together and come out with radically different takeaways.
To make matters worse, the charges were laid out in a worksheet packed with complex legalese that had some people doing mental backflips. Each charge had lockstep issues to vote on and at least 9 of us had to agree for or against to move forward. Why we couldn’t get the charges before the trial, I’ll never understand. We spent hours arguing about what certain phrases meant and going through our notes and digging through literal binders and binders of documents to prove why our loose definitions were right and others were wrong.
Luckily (or by design) we had an actual lawyer in the room who we unanimously chose as our Foreman to help us navigate the more treacherous waters. We later found out he was firmly on Team Plaintiff but rarely waded into the debate, knowing how much sway he held and doing his best to be impartial. Admirable, but rough for us.
We spent a week deliberating, which somehow felt longer than the previous three combined. By the end of the day, damn near everyone was physically and emotionally drained, each one taking a heavier toll than the last. The more time we spent arguing a charge the more people in the center swayed to the Defendants, ready to be done with it. It was a siege and we were losing.
We stopped having lunch together. Some stopped having lunch at all. The idea that someone you spent so much time with and had gotten to know so well could be so callous and lack basic human empathy was revolting. It’s the exact reason I’d left my job in the first place — I felt physically ill just being there.
But this wasn’t a job. It was a jury.
You Can’t Always get it Right
I’ve always hated giving speeches, but I’m pretty good at them.
In high school when my class ended up with co-valedictorians, I’d somehow stumbled into taking just the right classes to be slotted in as the salutatorian by like 0.01% of a point (GPA’s are stupid like that). The news did not excite me. All I could think about was how I didn’t want to speak at graduation.
The crowd had a lot to do with it, sure, but even in a modest speech class or a small circle of friends I get the same sinking feeling in my stomach when everyone’s attention is on me or my work. It doesn’t matter if I’m in front of a webcam or on a theater stage, if I’m part of a cast or alone. My mind always races with possible ways I can get out of it, right up until I open my mouth and I enter a sort of fugue state until the second I’m done.
I don’t remember many of them. If I do, it’s because I fucked it up and I’ll never let myself live it down. So it’s probably a good thing that I don’t remember any of the speeches I gave during Deliberations. What I do remember is feeling like I was talking to a wall, which makes sense because when we took a cursory vote on everything to start, we were a hung jury. And not for the last time.
Every day followed a familiar rhythm. Pick up on a charge we left on, people sharing thoughts they had overnight, and we vote. If it goes through, with 9 on either side, we move on. If it doesn’t, we talk about it. If that still doesn’t get us anywhere, we skip to something else we got hung up on, hoping the other talks have unlocked something new that will move us ahead. It was a relentless, vicious cycle that felt like it would never end.
But it did end. Because as hard as it was to keep going back into that room and keep arguing with people we respected, there was an unspoken agreement it couldn’t end in a mistrial. A month of our lives was worth more than that. So we kept talking.
The more we talked, the less speech-like it became. Instead of extolling the virtues of our own perspectives, we started asking each other why we felt that way, and more often than not, that’s when progress was made.
Which is the interesting thing about civil trials in the first place — two people disagree about an issue, lawyers talk until they fail to reach an agreement, so they take it to trial where the whole thing is nothing but speeches. Opening statements? Speech. Sidebar? Mini-Speech to the judge. Witness questioning? Wolf in Speech clothing.
But at the end of it all when the speeches are over and forgotten, the decision comes down to a conversation between twelve strangers and their willingness to keep talking and listen.
Our watershed moment came on day three.
After cycling through all of the charges multiple times, the retiree, who struggled to express herself and had voted staunchly against everything, decided that ‘yes’ there was a manufacturing defect the corporation hadn’t intended. ‘Yes’ that defect caused the Plaintiff’s illness, ‘yes’ they should be held liable and owe damages, both in medical expenses and emotional turmoil to the couple. It was a stunning reversal none of us fully understood. Talking about the amount of damages gave us a clue.
Putting a dollar amount on a human life is one of the worst experiences I’ve ever endured.
It doesn’t feel right and even though the Plaintiff’s lawyer offered a figure to aim for, writing it down didn’t seem like enough. They say in a civil case the Plaintiff has been broken and is seeking for the justice system to make them whole again, but how can any amount replace a cherished spouse of over 40 years? How does more money console a couple whose world-traveling retirement was cut short by a long-dormant disease? It can’t. But it’s something.
That’s when our retiree shared her gut-wrenching story: she’d lost her own long-time partner to cancer just a few years back. She hoped the trial would help her find closure somehow. In the end, I don’t know that it did.
I suspect the reason she voted ‘no’ to so many charges is because they all included language about the corporation’s intentions and state of mind. I don’t think she could accept the idea that any person would willfully allow customers to be exposed to such a devastating disease, but the fact that it had happened was clear.
Corporations, of course, reduce people to dollar amounts all the time. But that’s another speech for another day.
After we’d reached a guilty verdict on one charge and calculated damages, there were more dramatic moments to come: a moral impasse on one of the final charges, a rush to deliver the verdict to the judge before he shut us down for the weekend, a baffling double-negative confirmation of our votes that confused everyone and made Hermione think she’d prevailed after all. But the votes were counted and the verdict was confirmed. Truly the stuff Lifetime movies are made of.
The judge shook our hands and sent us on our way. The lawyers for both sides waited outside the courtroom and thanked us for our work (though the Defense chose not to shake my hand). We googled the issue on the courthouse steps to find that we were one of thousands of pending cases against the corporation over the same thing. A few of us went out for a much needed drink. We’d earned it.
I felt vindicated by the whole ordeal. None of it was a coincidence, I was somehow meant to be there, the timing was just too perfect. I could go home and sleep easy knowing I had done my duty and served well. But not all trials go like this one.
The American justice system is far from perfect. It’s been distorted over the years and there’s a nonzero chance our verdict could be overturned on appeal with the corporation’s massive resources and relentless legal teams. Their stock is doing just fine and their product still lines the shelves of your local grocery store. Criminal cases make it even harder to reach a guilty verdict and innocent people go to jail without ever getting a day in court for trivial reasons like politics and resource management. We may have won that battle, but the war may never end.
But we have to keep fighting. Because as hopeless as a win may seem, giving up is a sure way to lose. And as long as we keep the conversation going, there’s always a chance to make things right.
