Very many years ago, as a young and naive individual, I served on a jury. The short version of which is the following: a man was accused of trying to kill his wife. His wife, a woman clearly terrified, testified. He did not testify. All his lawyer did was essentially repeat over and over that everything that was said by the prosecution was in doubt. Casting doubt. Repeating doubt. Cementing doubt. There was nothing that could be proved. The woman of course was still alive. Did the man intend to kill her with the knife that he attacked her with or not? That was the question, we the jurors had to answer. Twelve of us on the jury and no split decisions allowed. We all had to agree on the answer. As soon as the deliberations started it was clear that ten were not sure, all that talk of doubt, doubt, doubt had done its job. I was among the two that were pretty sure he had intended to kill his wife. As long as we couldn’t come to agreement we would be sequestered and not allowed to go home. The ten doubters “convinced” the two dissenters to change our votes. We had a unanimous jury decision: not guilty. On the way out of the courtroom one fact that had not been allowed to be presented to the jurors came out: the man in question had killed his first wife. Could I have changed the minds of the other eleven? Who knows but the reality is that creating doubt is unfortunately relatively easy and the system tends to set the bar unrealistically high for most people to be able to convict the accused.
The American system of justice presumes that untrained individuals can make better decisions than trained individuals. The assumption is that what they lose in training they make up for in lack of bias; but the reality instead is that they are naïve and easily manipulated. The reality of the American court system is that judges get to rule in cases where they clearly have conflicts of interest and juries are easily manipulated. On the one hand we presume the jurors are competent enough to render complex opinions and on the other hand we don’t let them hear all the arguments because we don’t want them to be ”unfairly” biased. Add to that our more recent obsession with celebrity and these court room dramas become high school popularity competitions. Who likes who more? Whether or not someone is popular, pretty and or nice has zero to do with whether or not they are guilty or not. Some of the most effective sociopath’s are extremely charming which is in fact what makes them so effective. And yet juries given their generally limited understanding and training for the job required regardless of their good intentions end up relying on things like popularity just because that is something they all understand. The truth however is that if only the perfect can get justice, there is no justice!
To the mother who took her children out of school to hear the closing arguments in the Ellen Pao vs. Kleiner Perkins trial; I wonder how you feel now. To the defendant’s legal team who lost for winning, may your female kindred pay the price. To the jurors who voted no, I hope you have nightmares for years to come. To the jurors who voted yes, I hope you don’t have nightmares for years to come. To the jurors who changed their minds in private or in public: you will live with this for the rest of your life. I know because I have. To Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers just because you won, don’t think you don’t need to change. To Ellen Pao just because the jury didn’t agree, doesn’t mean you aren’t right.
