I, The Jury

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Remember last week, when I said we would talk about parks today? Oh, I had so much opining to do, and you ... you were going to listen!

But that was before I got jury duty, and you ... you, but of course, got it with me. Now! Everyone knows I love jury duty—I do! Doing my civic duty gets me all tingly and happy, and if I could wear my “I Voted” sticker all year long without looking like a homeless who doesn’t change her clothes, I would. Voting and jury duty in the same week? The French have a name for that, and it is “hog heaven.”

And so we got a courtroom, and a voir dire, and an almost-unheard-of one-day trial, and it was the stupidest case you’ve ever seen in your long life of seeing stupid cases. There was our judge, welcoming us with Dr. King’s quote about the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice—lovely!—and in our case, “justice” was some simpering lunatic chick suing a perfectly wonderful young man who didn’t do a thing wrong. Young lady, we will bend the moral arc of justice all over your ass!

Since it was Los Angeles, there were all kinds of fascinating racial sub-issues going on—because I am racist, and see race everywhere—such as the “model minority” face-off between the lawyers, an old Jewish man and a young Asian American woman. (She won in a walk.) The defendant was a gorgeous young black man (hand-some!), clean-cut and wearing cool square-framed black nerd glasses, and the plaintiff was a teal-haired, face-pierced girl of indeterminate melting-pot origin. (Maybe Cablinasian? With very cute freckles.) We all did our best to not be biased by the defendant’s handsomeness, and the plaintiff’s face piercings, or the varying efficacy of the lawyers. I mean, it wasn’t the plaintiff’s fault that her lawyer clearly hadn’t even gone over the case with her, while the young Asian American woman lawyer kept catching her in all kinds of lies, having circled things in the depositions that contradicted what the young lady was now saying, while the old guy hadn’t even read the depositions, and it was all just a travesty, and probably the reason it took three years for this case to come to court was because the court had better things to do.

Here is what our young lady plaintiff said happened, one long ago night on the 110: a van spun out of control and was headed straight towards her, so she had no choice but to scoot herself into the fast lane (in her original report, she said she was doing 45 or 50, but on the stand claimed 60 or 65, and that her memory was better now than then), at which point our plaintiff, who was doing 60 or 65, hit her, and she sued him for negligence. It turned out she’d had three other accidents immediately before and since: two on a Ducati (nice bike!), including the time two months before the accident with our defendant when she’d laid her Ducati down on Topanga Canyon and broken her back (and I wanted to know whom she’d sued then), but now she was suing our lovely defendant for pain and suffering because, as her old lawyer pointed out, she couldn’t “surf, swim, skateboard, snowboard, or be an artist,” which had nothing to do with having broken her back two months before, and then on the stand she referred to the Mitsubishi she’d been driving as a then-22-year-old as a “high-performance vehicle,” it was like a long record needle skraaaaaatch, and I and all the other middle-aged people on the jury with me (and the two or three nice kids in their 20s) seized in our seats and broke our eyeballs with unrestrainable rolling and wondered if we could order the DMV to snatch her license, as she is clearly a menace.

Here is something racist my family likes to do: list races and ethnicities in order of goodness at driving. (It’s a fun game my mom invented.) And in all of our lists of goodness at driving, black men came first (i.e. best). In my list, this was followed by Mexican-American men (but not Mexican-from-Mexico men), and then all the rest, in order. (You should play this game too! I am interested to see your extremely racist answers!) And in my list, young black women came last, because of tailgating and general aggressiveness. I did not let these clearly delineated and oft-thought-out and bullet-pointed stereotypes bias me. In fact, despite her general constant lying and getting caught in lies, we on the jury all agreed she might not have been to blame for the accident at all—sometimes, out-of-control vans come barreling straight at you, and you have to swerve into the fast lane and get hit. (There was actually some question of whether there had ever been an out-of-control van at all, whatever, it was really weird.) But in no scenario was it our nice young—and very pissed-off—defendant’s fault, and screw her for suing him!

And so our judge charged us all with following his explanation of the law, whether we agreed with it or not, and we all girded ourselves to be told that whoever hits someone else is automatically at fault even though that nice young man did nothing wrong, which was what we all thought the law was, and I was wondering if we could jury-nullify that particular bit of vehicle code (Jury nullification: the bedrock on which the First Amendment was built! Because hell yeah mama’s taken Constitutional Law and Civil Liberties!), but the judge never charged us with that at all. He just talked about the difference between “more likely to be true than not true,” which used to be “preponderance of the evidence,” (for civil cases) and “without a reasonable doubt” (for carjackings). One lady wondered if he thought we were imbeciles; I cheered her up with the thought that maybe we were!

(Later, addressing our alternate juror who didn’t get to make it a 13-0 verdict with us but said she would have, he quoted John Milton’s “On His Blindness.” Michael Paul Linfield is a man who loves being a judge!)

So it didn’t take us long at all to find, 12 or 13 to 0, that our defendant was not negligent and our plaintiff got nothing. (Except the time it took for our forewoman to read aloud an entire medical report, including every test given and chiropractic C5 rotated, or whatever, even after we’d all initially said he wasn’t negligent, so her medical report was irrelevant because there wouldn’t be any damages, and why do forewomen always insist on reading every little bit of material before letting you vote? And people were breathing kind of heavy and flaring their nostrils a little bit and hoping someone else would interrupt her? But nobody would? Has that happened to you before too? But it was good of her to step up and be forewoman, because everybody else was all, “We hate this girl too much for dragging us here in the first place for this bullshit case for us to be fair and impartial forepeople, and can we please award him his attorney fees for that hard-working (stereotype!) Asian American lady lawyer, who was so well-prepared? Hey, who else wants to throw that guy a barbecue? What do you say?” And she was all, “I think I could be fair and impartial,” and we were thrilled that someone could. So yay her!

Anyway, despite or because of the idiocy of the case, jury duty was kind of fun when it was all over. Nobody even really wanted to leave the jury room; there was still so much more bitching to be done! Each of the panelists had a smart point to make, well-thought-out and wise. And when you hear that the jury system es broked, because the only people on jury duty are the ones too stupid to get out of jury duty, har har guffaw ha, well, in my two jury experiences, my fellow panelists were smart and discerning enough to agree unanimously with me.

Justice has been served.

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