Preface
On Friday January 30th in the county of Kings, city of New York, state of New York, I was selected at random for two weeks worth of grand jury duty. I knew nothing of grand jury proceedings and was not looking forward to it. It’s actually pretty interesting. Here are some lessons learned.
Grand juries decide which cases will go to trial; they do not decide on the guilt or innocence of the accused. Their job is to consider two questions:
• Was a crime committed?
• Could the accused have committed the crime?
If the answer to either of these questions is “No,” they are compelled to vote for a dismissal.
If they answer to both of these questions is “Yes,” they are compelled to vote for a “True Bill,” or an indictment.
There are 23 jurors. There must be a vote of 12 either way, for True Bill or dismissal. If there are less than 12 votes in either direction, it is a called a “no answer” and I don’t know what happens then. We had one of those this week.
I am prohibited by law from revealing the details of cases so I’ll have to write in generalities. If I overstep my bounds, I’m sure I’ll be contacted by The Man, fined and jailed.
Procedure
The foreman sits where the judge usually sits. The foreman position is filled by a jury member; the jury is supposed to vote who this is before we begin (as I later learned in the yellow handbook they gave us) but our foreman was just told he was the foreman by the court official who welcomed us on Monday. The court official just selected the foreman to be foreman because he was Juror #1. He is Juror #1 because his last name comes first alphabetically, not because of his SAT score. An ideal foreman should be attentive, focused, not easily confused and, since it is he who swears in all witnesses and tallies the votes at the end, he should have a solid grasp of the English language. Ours is none of these things. Although he has no more power than the rest of us he still can make a mess of the proceedings by the simple virtue that he is our focal point. We look to him for guidance but he just looks back with enormous deer-in-headlight eyes. You can tell he wants to lead, he just doesn’t know how.
Jurors 2 and 3 sit at the “prosecution table” (the one on the left, near the jury box). Juror 2 is the assistant foreperson and would take over should Juror 1 be absent. Juror 2 is an odd duck who doesn’t talk much and has developed the custom of escorting the Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) out of the courtroom and waiting outside until the next ADA enters. We call him “The Mayor.” If our foreperson was absent and The Mayor had to take over, it would be anarchy. I think he would be despotic.
Juror 3 is the secretary. The rest of us are in the jury box, 4-13 in the front row, 14-23 in the back row. I’m #13, far right, first row, closest to the witness box. This has no strategic advantage, I just get to watch everyone at once, like James Stewart in Rear Window.
One ADA comes in at a time and presents his or her case. If they are good, they can knock these out in under 30 minutes. If they are new, incompetent or just unprepared it can take over an hour. We have one ADA (who will remain, legally, nameless) who is a consummate professional. He is clear, concise, he gets the story he needs out of the witness and gets them the hell out of there. We call him “The Closer.”
We only had two defendants come to court to plead their case. One was, in my opinion, laughable guilty; we indicted the hell out of him. The other was very credible but had the Holy Bible with him, as a prop, in my opinion. But twelve people bought it, despite the fact that everything he said flew in direct contradiction to the arresting officer. Some people, specifically some of the people of this jury of my peers, just hate cops. They want to believe that the NYPD is full of evidence planting pigs. These people watch too much CSI.
Maybe the young man learned a cheap lesson and will walk the line from now on. Or maybe he’s free to commit worse crimes. Or maybe he was just reading the good book in the lobby with his pals when the NYPD framed him. We will never know. God bless this mess.
As Sartre famously wrote, “Hell is other people,” and it is no different in the seemingly exitless courtroom environment. Invariably, the same two or three jurors will have an additional question for the witness that is completely irrelevant to the case, but the ADA is compelled to bring the witness back into the courtroom. So the ADA exits, brings the witness plodding back in, the foreman reminds the witness he is still sworn in, the ADA asks the foreman (for the record) if the witness has been reminded that he is still under oath, the foreman says “Yes,” the ADA says “Let the record so reflect,” asks the witness the irrelevant question, gets an answer, excuses the witness from the stand, waits until the witness has plodded out of the courtroom and asks the jury if we have any additional questions. Often we do. Sometimes this happens three or four times per witness.
Worse still, some jurors will ask the ADA to refresh their memory about details about the case that they should have written down. We are allowed to take notes in green notebooks that we must leave at the court every day, but only a few of us actually do. Every single time a juror asks a question of the ADA, the ADA must say this:
“Nothing I say constitutes evidence or has probative value – it is your recollection that controls and not mine. That being said, it is my recollection that …”
Sometimes the ADA fields 10 questions from us per case. Last week we had about 30 cases. Those words started making their way into my dreams on Wednesday night.
I can tell this frustrates the ADAs, but it is their job to get a True Bill out of us and if they have to re-spoon feed us facts, dates, and testimony mere minutes after we heard them, by God, then that is what they are going to do. It is Hell for them too. At least I am not alone.
Sexy Court Terminology
• “Hard” = street slang for crack cocaine
• “Rocas” = Spanish for “rocks,” Spanish street slang for crack cocaine
• To Voucher – when a police officer confiscates an item from a crime scene he “vouchers” it, putting it in evidence. A voucher number takes this form: P-######.
• Zips – bags which drugs come in. A fellow jury member described the size to me as a dime or nickel bag worth of weed. Cops will testify to finding “30 zips of a white powdery substance on the suspect.”
• Cops cannot say they found drugs on the defendant, since they did not technically know what was in the zip. Thus we hear a lot of “white powdery substance” (coke), “white rocky substance” (crack), and “white milky substance” (methadone, which is sold in a bottle)
• Pre-recorded buy money: US currency that is used in the drug buy. The serial numbers are photocopied beforehand by the police.
Elements of a “Buy and Bust”
One of the most popular types of cases we have had to vote on is called a “Buy and Bust.” It’s pretty straightforward and is hard not to vote True Bill. This is what happens:
• An Undercover agent (UC) slips in through the back door of the courtroom and is put under oath
• He testifies that on such a date and time he approached this type of male wearing this and that and asked him for some “hard”
• He receives a white powdery substance in exchange for pre-recorded buy money
• He leaves the scene and does a field test, which is 99.95% accurate
• He calls in his field team which makes the arrest on this type of male wearing this and that.
• He vouchers the evidence and sends it to Albany for testing
• The UC leaves the court and the arresting officer enters and is sworn in
• The arresting officer says on such and such a date and time he got a radio communication from the UC and arrested this type of male wearing this and that and recovered X amount of Y and Z dollars, usually including the pre-recorded buy money
• The ADA submits the lab tests from Albany as evidence, confirming the contents of the zips to be some controlled substance
• Then we are “charged,” which means we hear the charges and we have to vote on each charge. The ADA and stenographer exit.
• To streamline operations we started doing a blanket vote for all charges for open and shut cases like this. As long 12 jurors want to vote True Bill on all charges, it doesn’t matter if some jurors would have voted to dismiss on one or two charges.
More adventures next week!
*** Post Scriptum ***
Two of the female ADAs are extremely attractive, which is mildly distracting but I would never let this sway my vote or affect in any way my impartial nature. For the record, one is a younger, hotter version of Sarah Palin (accent included!!) and another is a younger, hotter version of Sarah Silverman. I’ll have to Facebook them when I’m done with my civic duty.
Hey Mike,
During my third year of law school at UGA, I’m handling some criminal cases/proceedings with a local county’s district attorney’s office for class credit. As part of that experience, I’ve had to present numerous proposed indictments to our grand jury, and I’ve enjoyed reading about your contrasting experiences as a grand juror. The grand jurors we had this past term could be quite inquisitive (much along the lines of your peers, to the point of irrelevance), some seemed overwhelmingly bored by the entire process, and others expressed quite a bit of gratitude when their service was up.
Our grand jury actually sits once a month for a six-month total term; the current grand jury had been empaneled since August, when I arrived at the DA’s office, and just finished their final month of service in January. I presume that we have exponentially fewer grand jury sessions than New York City because exponentially less crime is committed in Monroe, Georgia, than New York City–but that’s just an assumption, of course. That’s not to say we don’t get some decent cases to present, though.
Though I don’t know anything about New York criminal procedure, I can venture a guess at your “no answer” problem. My guess would be that, following a “no answer,” the ADAs would understand the close nature of the case and either A) dismiss the case outright, realizing that the charges presented in the indictment couldn’t win over the grand jury on a probable-cause hearing, and thus would never win over an actual jury beyond a reasonable doubt; B) change the charges on the proposed indictment and re-indict (if necessary–that is, if the indictment still charges felonies that must be presented); or C) re-indict the indictment as originally presented and no-answered (because no trial has been held and no expression of guilt or innocence given as to the defendant, no double jeopardy concerns would be implicated by re-indictment).
Like I said, I enjoyed reading about your experience and contrasting it to the relatively laid-back proceedings we have down here; as my work with our grand jury has been one of the more enjoyable things I’ve done, I’m looking forward to hearing more.
And I’ll let you know how the buy-bust trial I’m conducting in May goes!
This is FANTASTIC. I am learning the history of the jury system in school right now. It derives from the English Middle Ages when a jury from The Hundred (or town) gathered in a group of 12 to swear whether anyone in the Hundred was suspected of any crime. You would burn in hell if you suspected someone and didn’t fess up. This is the origin of the Grand Jury and we still ave that crazy medieval vestige today! If the person was suspect – then he would have to submit to an Ordeal. An ordeal is when a cleric (priest) administers a test and then God tells him whether the person is is guilty of innocent, depending on the outcome. Ordeal of Water involves being tied up in a special way and thrown into a body of water. If you float, it means that the pure water rejects you, which means God is saying that you are guilty, which means you die. If you sink – you are innocent (hopefully someone fishes you out of the water i time to tell you the good news). The other ordeal is the Ordeal of the Hot Iron Rod. The suspected person grasps the hot iron which burns the sh*t out of his hand. The priest wraps it up and after three days, examines the hand. If you are guilty, your hand will be all pussy and nasty. If you are innocent, it will be starting to heal. Fantastic system, right! In 1219 the Church banned all the ordeals — so the jury took over in England — as the body to hear evidence. People in Europe had a different response to the band of the ordeals. Instead of juries, they used professional judges (and torture) to hear evidence and determine guilt/innocence. So — today we still have juries and the Europeans do not.