When I was chosen as juror number nine, I didn't know what to expect. Like most people who aren't lawyers, I had what you might call a retail view of the law. I knew only some of its outer contours - tax filing requirements, traffic rules, and the like. I'd seen a few messy divorces and some nuisance lawsuits, and someone was always talking about someone else who "got off on a technicality." I suppose I thought of law as a sort of necessary evil that sometimes misfired. But after being on a jury I see the law differently - and I see myself differently as well.
Jurors are shown extraordinary respect. When I was sworn in, the judge told me I was now "a justice" of the court. The first time the jury entered the courtroom - and every time after that - everyone else was already there, and they stood until we sat down. The crown, the defence lawyers, the witnesses, the defendants, the judge, and the special officers of the court were uniformly respectful of one another and of us and of the trial process itself. It wasn't funereally solemn - though it was a murder trial - but all the participants were morally serious about their responsibilities. And the way we as jurors were treated showed that everyone else assumed we were already living up to those standards.
The rules we had to follow were explained to us by a court officer who was our shepherd - I think "jury constable" might be her proper title. We couldn't use elevators because we weren't to risk being alone with anyone connected with the trial. We assembled before court on a different floor from where the courtroom was, so that we wouldn't even see any of the others except during the proceedings. We were assigned a jury room of our own, and when we moved back and forth from there to the courtroom we always mustered in the same order. That probably helped our shepherd remember us; by the third day she knew everyone. "Good morning, Nine," she would say. "You haven't seen Seven this morning, have you?"
We were never to discuss the case except in the jury room and only when everyone was present. And we couldn't say anything to anyone else about our discussions. One day very early in the trial three or four of us were having lunch, and someone said her husband was curious about the trial. Someone else suggested she could talk about matters that happened in open court, but everyone quickly agreed that that was too risky - you could easily find yourself straying into jury matters. The simple rule was not to talk about the trial at all. I started taking evening walks by myself, and my wife was very understanding about it. It was wintertime, and the falling snow twinkled magnificently in the night as I followed along the paths from one light toward the next. It sounds relaxing - but I couldn't relax. The burden of attention never really went completely away while the trial was going on.
Someone from work asked me about the daily court schedule. Court started at ten; we usually had a short recess partway through the morning, then back to court until lunch; then an afternoon session usually broken up by another short recess; and we generally finished up somewhere around four. It sounded easy, said my colleague. But it wasn't at all easy. It wasn't like watching a movie or a play, where you just sit there being entertained. It wasn't like going to a lecture, where you're free to puzzle away over the parts you find most interesting, and pay attention to the lecturer only when you want to. We had to follow and understand everything. Everything the lawyers and the witnesses said, and the judge's explanations of various points of law. It was like not being able to blink.
There was a lot of material that required linking together, step by step by step. It wasn't the way television shows it, with the dramatic focus on a single telling point. The crown had to prove everything piece by piece. The ammunition casings that were found had to be shown to have been parts of the cartridges from which the killing bullets came, and the bullets and casings had to be proven to have come from a weapon fired at the scene by the accused. The police findings and the coroner's results had to be established bit by bit by bit, and then shown to be consistent with witnesses' accounts of what happened. A crime isn't a simple event, it's a long and complicated series of related events.
It wasn't just a matter of paying attention and remembering, either. Our job was to assess the evidence as objectively as possible. We weren't biased in advance either for or against the defendants - that had been settled to both sides' satisfaction during the jury selection process. But when I listened, hour after hour and day after day, to the crown and to the defence attorneys and to the witnesses, I couldn't help noticing and having to guard constantly against personal preferences. Did I really have good reasons for not crediting what this witness said, or was there just something about him that I didn't like, for reasons unconnected with the trial? Was I letting one attorney's narrative technique, or another attorney's gestures, impair my judgment? I had to follow all of the evidence and never let my assessments be influenced by the way it was packaged. I was tired after every session.
And it wasn't just an abstract exercise, a question of deducing historical ballistic truths from problematic narrations. Early in the trial we saw pictures of where the bullets pierced his skin. The pictures were clipped so that we never saw much beyond the wounds themselves. We never saw the young man's dead face, but we didn't have to. The violent killing of a human being was what this was about. Everything we had done, were doing, and would do was on account of that. Here is the shirt with his blood. Here are the shoes he was wearing. This was his hat. This is how long it took him to die when the bullets went where they did. You can pick up the casings, show how they were marked by the gun, understand what the weather was like that night, how the people and the cars came and went and how the music played, but every one of these things pointed to his death. No amount of twinkling snow could make me forget what I was involved with.
When the crown and the defence had finished presenting all their evidence, the judge gave us our instructions while everyone in the court listened. There was complicated legal material that I don't now recall in any detail. And after the judge told us what questions we had to answer and what legal logic we had to follow in answering them, he advised us how to behave during our deliberations. There were twelve of us for a reason, he said. Each of us would notice something that perhaps the others hadn't; each of us would bring a different set of abilities to the discussion. Some of us might be more comfortable voicing our opinions than others, and we should take care to see that everyone was allowed and encouraged to participate, because everyone had something valuable to contribute. We should accept one another's different strengths and weaknesses and styles. We should never belittle or shout down anyone. "That isn't what Canadians do," said the judge.
We went to our deliberations, and we came to our verdict, and we delivered it to the court. After we returned to the jury room for the last time to pick up our things, the judge came and thanked us. We said our good-byes and walked out of the courthouse, and I've never seen any of them again. But now I know what to say when I hear people giving reasons to avoid jury duty.
The first reason they give is that they have more important things to do. That takes an unbalanced and jaundiced view of how our law operates. Yes, some of the people involved are sometimes manipulative, or callous, or just too much self-interested - which is to say that some of the retail stories are accurate. But when I saw close up how a court functions to resolve truly serious matters, I came to feel deep respect. A great many quiet and for the most part unknown people labour conscientiously for everyone's benefit, and it is perverse to think you aren't obliged to help when you are asked, merely because you can cite instances where you think the law has somehow fallen short. There is a lot more good than evil in the law, as there is in people, and we should act accordingly.
The second reason people give is that the responsibility is too much for them. They couldn't bear to judge someone else; there is a chance they might judge wrongly. They might find the details of a crime terrifying. They are afraid that they are not the right people for the job, that they aren't strong enough or good enough. But it isn't true. We are better than we think we are. I saw myself and eleven other ordinary people live all the way up to what was required of us. We did difficult and important work and we did it well. It was the most solid foundation I can imagine for a proper sense of self-respect. I take myself more seriously now both as a person and as a citizen.
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