Jury Duty

I got a summons for jury duty recently.  Well, let's be totally honest here.  I really got a summons for jury duty back in January, but didn't go.  That's not to say that I intentionally failed to appear: my husband is the one who is in charge of picking up the mail at the post office.  He saw the jury summons and put it in a safe place so that he would remember to show it to me.  And then forgot all about it.  Oops.

So after I got the postcard threatening to send me to jail, I called and apologized profusely and the very nice lady at the courthouse rescheduled my service for during my vacation.  Which brings us to now.  My group number was excused, so I didn't have to go in this morning.  Stoked, right?

Not really.

See, I've never been on a jury, or even been in for jury selection.  I want to participate in the judicial system.  I want to participate partly because I think it would be interesting, but also because I know that I'm fair.  I hope that if for some reason I ever needed to face a jury of my peers that they would be equally fair with me.  Pipe dreams, right?  Oh well.

I've seen comments here and there on the interwebs along the lines of, "Innocent people don't tend to get put on trial in the US," or, "I hope this jury is smarter than that other jury and they fry this guy!"  I'm hoping those are mostly people trolling, but it's still a viewpoint that is out there being expressed.  When we get in the habit of assuming someone is guilty from the outset, then we HAVE no justice system.  Or at least not the justice system that we like to pride ourselves on as a free country.

This is why it drives me absolutely nuts that in some cases so much evidence is released to the media ahead of time.  For example, the Casey Anthony case.  All the way across the country I heard about police interviews, the changing stories, the lies, the computer searches, the duct tape, the smell in the trunk, etc. etc. etc.  And all of that was before the jury selection.  How could anyone get a fair trial under those circumstances?

Here's the thing: she's a US citizen.  She might be trashy, she might be a liar, she might be a little slutty, and she might be a child-killer, but she's as much a citizen as anyone else born and raised in the United States.  We have founding principles and a Bill of Rights based upon preserving our basic natural rights.  Those would be life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness if you listen to Thomas Jefferson; life, liberty, and property if you listen to John Locke.  Now, the whole idea of natural rights is that they are something you have by virtue of being born.  No one - especially not a government - is supposed to be able to deprive another of those rights without due process (that's the 5th amendment right there).  According to the 6th amendment, we're all entitled to be tried in front of an impartial jury in the area the crime occurred.  In Anthony's case, this trial is certainly going to determine whether she loses her right to life as well as liberty.  How was all the public speculation and analysis of evidence before the trial NOT going to taint the jury pool?

It doesn't matter what you think of her, she has the same rights as anyone else.  Once we start picking and choosing who gets full rights and who doesn't, then no one gets full rights.  I mean, what would be the criteria for deciding which citizens get a fair trial and which don't?  And yeah, analyzing whether someone is guilty or not based on partial evidence before the trial gets going is going to bias someone.  That creates a presumption of guilt.  We're instructed to assume everyone charged with a crime is innocent until proven guilty for a reason.  If we need to prove guilt, then we're going to send fewer innocent people to prison, since it'll bias a jury toward innocence.  The prosecutor has to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt because of this presumption, not the other way around.

If we presume guilt, then the burden of proof is on the defense - a person accused of a crime would have to prove that they didn't commit the crime in question.  That's way harder to do.  Can you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you didn't mug an old lady in that dark alley with no witnesses on the way home from work yesterday afternoon?  'Cause I don't think I could.  We move to that system, and we'll see a lot more innocent people go to jail.  And with the love affair our media has with reporting on scandalous, high profile cases before they hit the courtroom, we're getting there.

But I guess that's the choice, huh?  I had a discussion with a younger person a while ago about what system is better - it boiled down to whether it's more important to send more criminals (and innocent people) to jail, or fewer innocents (and thus fewer criminals, too).  She told me that in her opinion it would be better to have more innocent people convicted of crimes they didn't commit in order to get more actual criminals off the streets.

Well, all I know is that I hope if my time comes I get someone who believes the opposite.  And for my part, on any jury I serve on I'll sow the seeds of that karma by trying to reserve judgement until after hearing both sides and weighing the evidence.  I'm just a little bummed that I didn't get to start that today.