Doing My Duty

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I’ve twice been called for jury duty. Not once have I served.

First time, many years ago, I was a law student. Nobody wants a law student on the jury. Not the prosecution, not the defense. A law student might actually pay attention to the law, to the facts, and how the facts interact with the law. Can’t have that.

Second time, today, was worse. If nobody wants a law student on the jury, nobody and his little brother want a criminal defense lawyer on the jury. The prosecution, for obvious reasons. The defense? Every defense lawyer knows that probably eighty-five percent of folks charged with a criminal offense are guilty. Not quite proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but getting there.

This was the first major criminal trial in my home town since March 2020 held in person without social distancing. We still had to wear masks. For ten hours if you were there for the entire jury selection process. I was there for the entire jury selection process. Nobody ever found out I was a criminal defense lawyer. Nobody found out, because nobody asked.

A panel of twelve jurors and one alternate juror was chosen for this trial from maybe fifty persons who were called at random to occupy twenty-five seats. Only people in those seats are asked questions.

Some of those people are almost always dismissed for cause, meaning the judge agrees with the lawyer who challenges the juror that he or she cannot be fair, unbiased, or physically or emotionally capable of serving. The juror may be the sole caretaker for a person who may starve to death if uncared for, for a week. The juror may be unable to look at the defendant without thinking, gee, he looks guilty as hell. The juror may be a blogger who has written that the judge is an idiot and the prosecutor a fascist.

There are twenty-five seats of people asked questions because, as I mentioned, only thirteen will be chosen as jurors, and the other twelve will be removed at the end of the process for no stated reasons at all. Those twelve are called peremptory challenges, of which the prosecution and defense each get six.

Unstated reasons to reject a juror are as many as there are things we don’t say out loud. The prospective juror is black and I don’t like black jurors (unconstitutional but frequent and often unchallenged). She looks like my mother and my psychiatrist knows only too well what I think of my mother. That juror seems really committed to that nonsense about innocent till proven guilty and by God determined to be fair and I don’t want fair I want guilty.

I had the great good fortune not to hear my name randomly called to rotate into one of those twenty-five seats.

The great good fortune because, even in a mask, the defendant looked guilty as hell.