Jury Duty in 4D

Sometimes there are no right answers.

Photo by Billy on Unsplash

I was called for jury duty this week and initially felt kind of excited to serve.

The call came during a (somewhat) slower week at work, so I could make the time.

The case was criminal—a murder case—and I thought it would be interesting to see the dynamics of a trial case in our adversarial system in a way I’ve only actually read about.

Finally, as a political scientist and political theorist who spends considerable time thinking about rule of law, the institutions that sustain our democracy, and the complexity of human decision-making, I felt I could make a real contribution to whatever jury I was on.

My first impressions, from arrival through initial round of questioning, were heartening. The staff were genuinely friendly and we were reminded repeatedly about how important our participation was and how proud we could be to serve.

Apart from interest, I felt a swelling of civic pride. This was democracy at its best, I felt.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, that’s what most Americans report feeling about about jury duty after the fact — it tends to be personally meaningful to the jurors who served and instills both pride and hope in the American system.

But I got a lot less comfortable once the full four dimensional reality of the case hit.

Whether we like it or not, we tend to think about the criminal justice system in binaries, at least in the abstract. There are often good guys and bad guys. Criminals and victims. Prosecutors and defendants. The very nature of our adversarial system creates binaries that are hard to bypass.

One we get into individual cases though, the full four dimensions become much more clear.

And that’s where we have to confront the realities of a non-binary, complex and sometimes very tragic world.

Unrevealed Biases

One thing that the full four dimensions pulls out is the existence of biases people don’t even realize they have.

During the initial round of questioning, I was surprised how many jurors admitted their inability to remain objective. It was a small minority, admittedly, but I was still surprised there were that many at all.

On one level it was heartening that they freely admitted they couldn’t be objective during questioning. It was also telling that the biases (at least those they admitted to) didn’t relate to broad categories like gender or race, which is what we often expect. Instead, they had to do with the specific details of the cases. The complex four dimensional shape of the landscape, in other words.

One woman explained she would struggle to remain objective because the victim was 92 and her father was in his 90s.

Another juror had read news reports about the case and found it so straightforward that additional details seemed unlikely to change his perspective.

Another juror said he had seen so many similar crimes in his own neighborhood that he didn’t feel he could start with a presumption of innocence.

I was quietly preening myself about my own abilities to remain objective when the judge provided additional context on the case.

The defendant was 17 years old and facing a second degree murder charge.

A kid just five years older than my daughter was facing a long stretch in prison and a felony conviction that would taint the rest of his life.

I’ve taught classes that dealt with brain science and the law and I know that the prefrontal cortex takes a long time to fully develop. When you add possible trauma, low socioeconomic status and familial dysfunction, you get a toxic developmental stew that undermines impulse control and encourages future discounting.

None of it is good.

The possibility of convicting a teenager from inner-city Rochester of murder changed my feelings toward not just the case but toward jury duty generally.

I felt a little less civic pride and a lot more (deep) sadness.

The Imperfection of Human Institutions

That sadness didn’t mean that jury duty itself was at fault. We need more juries, not fewer.

But that sadness forced me to confront the reality that sometimes the most necessary tasks citizens have to carry out are also the most impossible. Or at least they’re ones with no good or just answers.

They certainly don’t fall on a binary or one-dimensional line.

Many of us in higher ed and the civic engagement world sometimes - unintentionally - downplay how hard democracy can be. We want people to feel optimistic and hopeful about liberal democratic institutions. And we want them to think that their decisions matter; that the arc of history bends toward justice and that they play a role in the shaping of history.

As a result, we tend to frame civic engagement as people sharing shovels or debating policy. When we focus on the hard parts, we often focus on civil disagreement, political dysfunction or corruption. These are problems with potential solutions.

I think all of that is generally right and good, for whatever it’s worth.

But sometimes democracy also means sitting with impossible decisions.

Sitting in that courtroom, I looked at a young kid whose prefrontal cortex was still unformed, who was doing something idiotic, got scared, and killed someone. A kid who faced spending his formative years in prison. A kid with a family and a very uncertain future.

And not visible to us potential jurors at the time, his mirror image was a family whose loved one was gone altogether, whose death was not only preventable but violent.

The Weight of Other People's Lives

Ultimately, I don't know what I would have done.

I don't even know if I would have made the final jury pool.

The day ended (as more than 90% of trials do in the U.S.) with the defendant (still a kid) taking a plea before the second round of jury selection was complete.

I was fortunate not to decide the fate of a 17-year-old. I didn’t have to decide whether he would have a future. That decision was removed from my hands, and I guess on some level I’m grateful.

But someone did have to make it.

And I’m not sure he got a better deal with the plea than he would have gotten with us.

None of us will ever know.

The hardness of this case hits even harder in a deeply segregated city like Rochester, where public schools mere miles apart exist in completely different worlds of quality, access, and outcomes. Beyond schools, the disparities extend to family stability, economic circumstances, and countless other variables. The differences between this young man's life and my children's lives are vast.

It's one of those moments where there, but for the grace of God, go my children and I rings both true but also feels fundamentally unjust.

And all that’s before we add in the structural problems within our criminal justice system itself: jurors can't remedy a system where most defendants never face a trial of their peers, where we have growing crises of forensic and other kinds of evidence, and disparities in access to legal counsel (not to mention access to everything else above).

Being a juror feels like less about finding truth than about muddling through a deeply unjust system to make the best decision we can, knowing that the best decision we can make might still be the wrong one.

Hope and Heartbreak

Ultimately though, the thoughtfulness and honesty of my fellow would-be jurors gave me a lot of hope for our democracy, even as the structural problems with our justice system continue to be deeply troubling.

And that’s part of the complexity of our shared human life too. Sometimes our most important civic duties force us to confront both the best of what we can be and the hardest truths about where we’re failing.

The experience was also a good reminder to me as a political theorist not to downplay the hardness of what we ask citizens to do. Not just on juries, but in ballot boxes and in daily disagreements over what are sometimes existential conflicts or insoluble problems.

I try to be optimistic on this Substack, but I want that optimism to be realistic. Our optimism about shared human life should be rooted in what’s possible for humans and human communities, not in utopian hopes.

And so we can't forget that while liberal democracy is a wonderful gift, a gift wrought by centuries of ingenuity and bloodshed and deep conviction that human freedom matters, actually participating in it often means confronting head on the consequences of poor choices, broken systems, and deep human tragedy.

It’s also important - always - that when we talk about institutions and liberal democracy and civic pride that we zoom back in to confront the realities of those ideas in the lives of real humans, including the imperfect, the broken, and the struggling ones too.

Thinking in 4D requires that we be able to survey the entire landscape of our shared spaces but also that we move back in to see how our shared decision-making affects individuals, particularly those who are the most vulnerable.

Zooming back in then, my thoughts are with that kid, his family, and the family of the victim. I hope all of them can find some kind of peace even if they can’t find justice.

Your Turn!

I’d love to hear about any jury experiences you’ve had. Were they hard? Meaningful? Both? What struck you the most about the experience? Or let me know what you think about our criminal justice system, jury trials broadly, or even just the future of liberal democracy! As always, the comments are wide open and I love to hear from you all. And of course, if you haven’t already, please share and subscribe if you like my work. Reader shares are one of the only ways to beat the algorithm that privileges most of what I try not to do here. Thanks as always for your support.