Has anybody else out there wondered what it would have been like to be among the 96 prospective jurors brought to Manhattan Criminal Court last week and grilled about their alleged impartiality and ability to be unbiased in an historic trial?
On the grounds that I may incriminate myself, I’m going to admit that—on the few occasions I was summoned for jury duty—I experienced the ambivalence of wishing to fulfill a foundational civic duty even while uneasy about weighing the fate of another human being.
Furthermore, there is jury duty and then there is this front-page, in-the-headlines jury duty in which the court of public opinion appears to apply to the jurors as well as the wildly polarizing defendant. This rough-and-tumble affair could put a different spin on the term “hung jury.”
Anyway, I bring limited judgment to the process. I did see the Broadway production of Twelve Angry Men years ago. (Famous quote from Juror No. 10: “I’m sick and tired of facts. You can twist ‘em any way you like.”) As a young lad, watched TV’s Perry Mason (ask your grandmother) and enjoyed the recent Netflix series “Lincoln Lawyer,” which provides as many beauty shots of Los Angeles landmarks as it does of courtroom drama.
It could be argued that television tends to glamorize crafty defense attorneys for finding loopholes in the prosecutors’ claims, and that can make for good entertainment. But there also is the old joke: What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean floor? A good start.
OK, then. There were only two occasions when I came close to serving on a jury. In the mid-1980s, I didn’t even make it through the first round of questioning in the notorious racial case of four white youths who had attacked three Blacks in Howard Beach, Queens. What apparently got me eliminated from jury consideration then was my occupation—newspaper reporter, though I almost strictly covered sports—and the assumption that I surely was up to speed on details of that widely publicized crime.
In 2001, for a trial on Eastern Long Island involving a drunk driver who had caused serious injury, I progressed all the way to the final round of the lawyers’ interrogations. After quite a wait in a holding room, then sitting through the detailed questioning of the shrinking pool of potential jurors (“What is your occupation? What does you spouse do? Do you have children? How do you get your news?”), there was a building sense of feeling that I ought to be in the game.
Alas, one of the attorneys wanted to know whether I could identify when a person is inebriated. Though I admit having thought, when the charges originally were laid out—“Guilty! Fry him!”—I had become convinced that I could consider all the evidence before coming to a conclusion. Just as I was dismissed.
The sense that there is a prejudice—is that the right word?—against impaneling journalists because our job is to keep up with the news strikes me as thoroughly downside-up and outside-in. Because a good journalist must remain open to learning all the facts and understands that nothing is black and white; there always are gray areas to examine. Lots and lots of them.
But in the end, my glancing familiarity with the inside of courtrooms—and I am not unhappy about this—has been restricted to covering a handful of appearances of athletes and other personnel from the sports world charged with untoward behavior.
In the summer of ’86, I was in Houston on another assignment the same day two New York Mets, Tim Teufel and Ron Darling, appeared for at a 45-minute hearing for aggravated assault charges during a barroom brawl. In 1991, I was in Indianapolis, chronicling a gymnastics championship, when my editor ordered me to file a report on boxer Mike Tyson’s arraignment there on rape charges. (That included an 80-minute post-hearing lecture by boxing promoter Don King that Tyson was only guilty of fighting against the “celebrity burden” faced by such boldface names as James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, John Belushi, Marilyn Monroe and Freddie Prinze.) Tyson later was convicted.
In 2011, when Jets wide receiver Braylon Edwards entered a guilty plea in a DWI case, reporting duties brought me to the same courthouse where a certain former reality television personality now is on trial for paying hush money to a porn star.
There also was my editor’s insistence to monitor the 2012 appearance of a Mets clubhouse manager/traveling secretary accused of running a gambling ring, stealing team memorabilia and skimming hotel money. He later acknowledged such dark deeds.
I contend, in bearing witness to these things, that I was impartial and unbiased. As for the culpability of the defendant in the show trial just starting now—con man? convict?—not my job.