Dury Juty: Day 1
A mind-numbing descent into the American judicial system.
Trigger Warning: The following contains depictions of sexual assault, violence and physical abuse.
I'm late. As I pull into the parking garage of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA, I realize I've forgotten my jury summons, which is also my parking pass for the duration of the trial. I throw the car in reverse as I back out of the garage and drive around the block to find a metered parking spot where I can pull over and call my wife. “Do you see it on the table? Or maybe I left it in the studio?” She can't find it. I rummage through my bag again before spotting the corner of the paper wedged along the side of the front seat.
I have a tendency to get anxious about new situations, the trepidation of not knowing what I'm doing or where I'm supposed to go. Once the call ends, the buffer of time I had allotted by leaving early has evaporated and left me feeling rushed — a feeling I try to avoid. The entry to the parking garage is now backed up around the block from the opposite direction, leaving me with no choice but to wait. After a full light cycle with no break, a relentless car horn starts blaring and a black BMW X5 whips around me into oncoming traffic, barreling their way into the sea of cars and into the parking garage. I find myself feeling triggered, in the specific way minor traffic violations can sneak up on you, but before I can even process it, I realize that the car behind the BMW is trying to do the exact same thing. I soon find myself yelling out my window at a middle-aged man in glasses. He looks at me with a blank timid stare, now second-guessing his brashness, but seeing that he's committed, he has to follow through.
I finally make it into the garage with a fresh reminder that there is a different kind of flow here. There are the rules, then there are the LA rules — the concession of nearly 4 million people living in close quarters. As I'm driving down into the depth of the garage, it dawns on me that timid glasses man may too be on his way to jury duty, and that I might run into him again. I pull into a space in the opposite direction of his car, quickly make my way to the escalators, and walk out on to Grand Avenue towards the courthouse.
I got my first summons less than a year after moving to LA, and a part of me felt that I should have had a little more time before being called to serve on a trial. I lived in Nashville for twelve years before I was ever even summoned. I had a trip already planned during the original timeframe and so I deferred, picking October of 2023. At the time it had seemed far enough away that it might magically disappear, and I could go on with my life uninterrupted.
In California they notify you first by mail, then you have to fill out an online profile where the communication then switches to an archaic email service where you are instructed on what day you are expected in court. Inevitably come October, I am reminded of my summons and when checking in Sunday night, I'm relieved to find that I don't have to go in. Monday evening I check again, and there is a short message stating to be at 210 West Temple Street by 9:45am the next morning.
I arrive at the main entrance of the courthouse and put all of my loose belongings — ID, headphones, car keys — into a small bag and slide it through the metal detector. I walk into the main lobby and am met with a cavernous, three-story tall marble hall, with the entrance to the jury waiting room off to the left side. I wait in a short line, hand in my certificate to a clerk who then gives me a badge and tells me to wait in the adjacent room.
The room is large and filled with a sea of dull gray chairs, a hundred or so people scattered throughout the lifeless space. A few flatscreen TVs hang on the wall with various announcements and instructions. I try listening to music, but am worried I might miss my name being called or some additional information and put my headphones back in the bag.
A little after 10am, a woman approaches the large wooden podium at the front of the room and begins reading names from a sheet of paper. I'm still hopeful that somehow my name won't be on the list and I can go home. I look around the room and see every strain of society present — so many stories and demographics made equal by this inescapable requirement of being an American citizen. All of us here, none of us wanting to be. My name is called along with eighty or so others and we're told to head to the 11th floor and wait outside of room 112.
The elevators barely work, and with a large group now trying to go up simultaneously, I know it will take some time. I crowd in with everyone and at our stop, we step onto a dirty white tiled floor and into a long rectangular hallway with eight courtrooms lining the outskirts. It seems like multiple groups of jurors are here waiting, and the numbers are even more excessive than at the elevator. At courtroom 112, a man opens a dark heavy wooden door and begins to call out the last four digits of our juror ID numbers. We are each handed a laminated square number printed on blue paper, a way for us to be identified while still remaining anonymous. I'm number 29. I do the math in my head. How many jurors? 12? 14? Alternates. I still have a chance at avoiding it.
After some time, the man reemerges from the same door stating that there has been a mistake and he needs to redo our numbering. One of the prospective jurors, already the most talkative and attention-seeking of the group, begins making jokes under his breath for his captive audience. There's a collective sigh from those with low numbers, countered by the reawakened fear in those higher on the list. He begins to call out our ID numbers again, only this time he's skipping around. 1, 3, 8, 12. Now I'm 56, though I feel like sequentially I'm still the 29th option. Forty-five minutes have passed.
We enter the courtroom. The first eighteen people are instructed to fill in the chairs in the jury box while the rest of us settle into wooden church-like pews that line the back of the room. In addition to the judge, there is the court clerk, a bailiff, the District Attorney and the Defense Attorney, who is standing next to the person I assume is the reason we are all here, the defendant. The judge is a firm, but polite woman in her late fifties with bleached blonde hair. Her name is like something out of a Tarantino movie, it might as well be ‘Connie Argentina.’ She informs us that this is a murder trial and she expects it to take at least six days. There is a brief introduction before the prospective jurors are each told to answer ten questions on a sheet of paper in front of them.
The questions are expected. What is your occupation? Have you or anyone you know ever been the victim of a violent crime? If called upon, are you willing to uphold the law? One by one, each person reads through the list, stating their occupation then answering yes or no to the questions. There is a social media talent manager, a student, a retired financial investor, an auto-body shop owner, among others.
The first few people breeze through before a retired elderly man, probably in his mid-seventies, is asked to answer the questions. He is clearly agitated before he even begins. The judge asks the man to clarify his “yes" answers, and he begins to talk about how his mother was shot and killed in front of him when he was four years old. His last memory of her is her body lying in a casket with "four bullet holes in her chest and two in her head.” When probed about another answer, he states that he would have an incredibly hard time remaining objective in a case involving the LAPD. His sister had been married to a former Chief of Police in Los Angeles County who had cheated on her with multiple women, including women he had arrested. The man said he couldn't trust the LAPD because he knew all of their "dirty laundry." When asked if he'd prefer to be on a civil case he shouted, “That's what I've been trying to say from the beginning!”
A few jurors later and there is another woman detailing into the microphone how she had been sexually assaulted. When questioned further, she asked if she could speak to the judge privately. The next woman tells a story about how she had been a bank teller at a "nationally known bank,” intentionally not sharing the name. She proceeds to say how she used to be a very positive and trusting person, working as a greeter to welcome customers in. One day there was an armed robbery and it changed her, and even though it had happened over a decade ago, she was still shaking while talking about it. She continued on, remembering her favorite customer, an elderly woman, who had been in the bank at the time of the robbery and was forced to get down on her knees. The customer had never recovered, and had to have multiple surgeries to fix her hips.
The next woman says that she has a hard time answering yes or no questions, and that she’s, “the kind of person who takes days to respond to texts and emails.” Another man, the auto-body shop owner, mentions that if he isn't at work his guys won't know what to do. He really needs to be there. He would have to work till 4am in order to be make up for lost time. Later, the defendant's lawyer asks him if he would be distracted and in a rush to leave while listening to evidence for multiple days on the case. He answers candidly, “Absolutely I would.”
Another man, not in the main group, raises his hand and says he has a health issue where he's unable to sit for longer than twenty minutes. “I'm willing to serve on the jury, but I need to stand ever so often.” For the next four hours, I look down the row and see him stand up every twenty minutes on the dot, shake his legs briefly and then sit back down. Another man has diabetes and says he could lose the ability to reason properly if his insulin dips. One woman barely speaks English, and the judge is confused about how she got this far into the process without knowing how to speak the language. The woman said she had lived in the US for twenty-five years.
One man details his nephew's drug dealing plus his own time in jail for a DUI. Multiple other potential jurors talk about how triggered they’d feel having to be on a case that involved murder. The judge responds that she doesn't know anyone that would feel good on a murder trial and that it was besides the point.
Another woman is asked why she answered “no” to the question about whether she was willing to uphold the law if called upon. She goes on to explain how she has a lot of issues with the whole idea, and believes that there is always more backstory and nuance than the law can account for. She keeps saying the word nuance. There's more nuance, she'd have to factor in nuance. The judge pushes back on her and tries to unpack her philosophy a little bit more. The woman, now swimming in her unexamined vaguely anarchist ideas, is clearly unable to back them up. “I don't know. I just think there's always nuance.”
I'm getting restless and the hard wooden benches aren't helping anything. Phone use isn't allowed in the courtroom and my addiction is becoming more apparent with every passing hour. As I distractedly take in the room, I begin to notice all of the wood everywhere. Walnut covered desks, mid-century slatted walls, recessed wooden panels on the ceiling, a heavily crafted barrier wall to separate the gallery from the rest of the room.
I have this distinct feeling of being close to what I guess I would call ‘power,’ in a way that isn't normally apparent in day-to-day life. This morally rigid system feels like a forgotten world of black and white simplicity compared to the social and political chaos that seems to fill up the everyday now. There is this very "this is how it is, deal with it" dynamic to the whole proceeding, which is brought into focus by the flimsy excuses and vaguely philosophical arguments people use to try and get out of being on the jury. It’s like watching people run into a brick wall over and over again, and I can’t look away.
A Boomer-aged man is secretly scrolling on his phone before he's spotted by the bailiff who comes over and tells him to put it away. The man's eyes burn into the back of the bailiff as he walks back to his chair near the entrance.
We break for lunch at exactly noon. There is a large decrepit cafeteria that reminds me of a dated public high school, food included, except here it's $20 for a soggy burger, half-cooked fries and a bottle of water. I have to pay for lunch as they don't give you any allowance unless you are officially selected for the jury. I look over and notice the class clown from our group. He had been one of the early jury prospects — it came out that he was a fireman who knew the paramedic who had responded to the murder scene. He's very loud, still making jokes under his breath, looking around the room to see how his routine is going over. He's the only person from my group that I notice makes friends with someone, and is soon having lunch with them talking their ear off.
The lines are long as I overhear another conversation between a man and a woman. He really wants a hamburger, but he also really wants the clam chowder. He asks the woman to get in the other line for him so he can have both. Other items on the menu are chicken parmesan, pasta and veggies, and a Cobb salad. I settle on the burger, only because it has the shorter line.
I find an empty table and my thoughts wander back to the courtroom. I'm struck by how lighthearted the judge is at times, especially with the defendant being present in the room. She tells us what she is watching on Netflix and cracks jokes with some of the jurors. One man worked at a museum and she made a big spiel about how much she loved her job, but if she could do anything else it would be to work at an art museum. She said how much the potential juror must love working there, to which he halfheartedly shrugged.
After lunch we line up back outside the courtroom and filter in as the selection process picks up where we left off. People admit to all sorts of details either out of strategy or from nervousness. One woman tells a story about how her uncle had been hit by a car once when he was crossing the street — attempting to imply that this would affect her ability to judge a murder trial. Multiple people talk about distrusting the police in very vague terms. One man details having to be locked overnight in a drunk tank, while others rattle off family members with arrest histories for drugs and armed robberies.
An older gray-haired man talks about how when he was ten years old, his house was broken into. He and his whole family had been upstairs sleeping when it happened, and to this day he is still terrified to go to sleep. One woman works as a TV producer, “mainly reality TV, but some crime shows” she is quick to point out, before going on to detail how she had been raped. Someone else is a hotel valet. One works in IT. Another is unemployed. A few more are lawyers.
As the potential jurors continue to work their way through the ten questions, the judge repeatedly accentuates the point that we are not here to decide someone's fate. We're not judging the goodness or purity of an individual, but are being presented with information and it's our job to decide what did or did not happen. It is a very stoic, unemotional approach — a direct response to the perceived resistance everyone feels to be deciding the fate of another human being.
We end right at 4pm, without having picked the final jury, and are asked to return the following morning at 10am. I can't help but think that we ran out of time because the judge's assistant had messed up the numbering system. I make my way to the elevator, then decide to take the stairs, needing time to process everything I just witnessed.