What Really Goes On in a Grand Jury Room

A while ago I got a letter instructing me to report for grand jury duty. My boss was horrified, and made me write a letter explaining how vital it was for me to be excused. But for me, it was a chance to see how our Constitution works. Better yet, it was a chance to see the criminal justice system without actually having to go to prison and getting anally gang-raped. It was an eye-opener.

Jurors are forbidden to repeat anything that was said in the jury room. But I have since moved to another state and grown a moustache, and besides, I am confident that all the judges, lawyers, prosecutors, and the DA (the top prosecutor) are now safely behind bars. Just to be safe, I will lie a lot.

1. Nobody talks to anybody else.
We met once a week. In the morning, before the D.A. shows up, everyone chats. Not with each other. Oh, no. Cell phones were invented for the express purpose of ensuring that no one ever has to talk to a stranger. Not having one myself, I could only sit there and kick myself for not having patented the damn things myself when I thought of the idea a few years earlier.

So next time I brought a book on constitutional law and started reading it. I learned a lot. Mainly I learned that legal books are not very well written. But I had to keep it covered up—jurors are not supposed to know anything about the law. If we ever mentioned a legal point, we'd get thrown off and replaced by an alternate. That's what alternates are for. That, and getting murdered by a suspect.

2. Criminals are really stupid.
We've all heard the stories about burglars getting stuck in chimneys and robbers trying to hold up police stations. But some of the victims were not much better. The difference was that their stories were very sad. It was emotionally draining to hear just how tough their lives are. There was one woman who kept getting beaten up by her boyfriend. So she kept leaving him. Finally she left for good. But he got her back by giving her somebody else's brand new car. Then he killed her. The details were pretty grisly.

3. Cops are bad shots.
For this, every citizen should be grateful. One cop shot at a moving car with a shotgun from three feet away ... and missed. There was suppressed snickering when we heard this. But in fact, this is what we should want from our government. It's what makes America great: Police who can't shoot straight. A Congress that can't pass laws. A president who sits around eating burgers, drinking beer, burping, and who spends his free time getting blow jobs from White House interns (Note: not mentioning any names here). That's what keeps us free, and what's more it's something we can all aspire to.

4. We have some very strange laws.
It was illegal in our state to possess small plastic bags. They're considered drug paraphernalia, and owning one is considered prima facie evidence that you're a drug pusher. We indicted a bunch of people, from what I could tell, solely because they (1) had a bunch of plastic bags on them and (2) they were scumbags. That's all it takes in America to have your house, your car, your speedboat, your collection of AK-47s, your 500,000 rounds of 7.62×39 FMJ and your Ecuador-registered airplane confiscated by the cops.

So okay, maybe that one guy was a little suspicious. But I was surprised to see my upstanding fellow citizens indict each and every one of those Baggie-toting scumbags, 22 to 1.

There are lots of laws for which the presumption of innocence doesn't apply. This is called ‘strict liability.’ For example, if there are explosive materials on your property, and they detonate, you are guilty, period. Statutory rape, where you have sex with an underage person, is another one. If you're one day over the age of consent, and you have sex with someone one day under, it's a felony, even if they showed you their birth certificate first. That was our DA's favorite. We got lots of those cases. They were easy to prove. It was always the girl's parent who brought the case in. The boy was always a ‘pervert’—or in today's lingo, a sex criminal.

5. If once you don't succeed, try, try again.
The rule was, if there was a plausible reason to believe that a crime was committed, we were supposed to indict. The standard was not probable cause, not preponderance of the evidence, just whether we believed something had happened. The first couple weeks, we'd weigh the evidence skeptically before voting. A good case might get 15 to 8. A bad one would get 12 to 11. Lots of times we didn't indict at all. The prosecutor tries to get as big a majority as possible, because ‘squeakers’ are looked upon unfavorably by his or her peers. So the DA would just bring the same case back over and over to wear us out. Sometimes we heard the exact same evidence three or four times. Most of the jurors just gave up and voted yes just to get on to something different.

6. Jurors get no respect.
The lawyers and prosecuting attorneys clearly had no respect for the grand jury system. To them, it's an unpleasant obstacle to be bypassed. We were treated like dirt. By the time our term was up, most of us were so anxious to leave that it was scarcely necessary to present any evidence. And those 22 to 1 verdicts (yep, that one dorky guy in the back with no cell phone) always got rounded up to ‘unanimous.’ The grand jury system is not designed to be fair. It's intended to be a restraint on the prosecutor. But the prosecutor runs the whole show, and he knows all the tricks. Well, at least it's fair to somebody.

7. Women jurors chat up the lawyers.
The social dynamics are such that the jurors come to take sides with the prosecutors, because the prosecutors are the ones who have the most power. People hate being on the losing side. When given a choice between being on the losing side and compromising their principles, 99% of the time people will compromise. The female jurors were the worst, chatting with the cops and the rich lawyers, cracking jokes and frivolously asking things like how much above the speed limit you can go without getting a ticket. By the end they considered themselves part of the system. Guess it made them feel safer.

8. Evidence is often dirty.
Cops gather evidence however they can. But if it's been obtained illegally (for instance, if it came from the feds or from a Stingray, a fake cell tower), they're not allowed to use it in court. So they backtrack, using the information to create a plausible chain of evidence that's collected legally. It's easy when you know in advance where the evidence will lead, their phone numbers, and their home address. And it's done a lot.

9. If you're a ham sandwich, stay away.
At lunch, we went out to the local sandwich shops that surround the place. I tried to find a ham sandwich, but there were none to be found—apparently all the ham sandwiches within a ten-block radius of the courtroom were already rotting in prison. So we ate tuna fish bagels. There were no ham sandwiches (or any other kind of food) allowed in the jury room, either. Lucky for them. They wouldn't have lasted long.

jun 21, 2015