01 July 2009

A Juror’s Role

Proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to jurors can be a stiff test. While a chance exists that a guilty man or woman might go free after a jury trial, the jury system still beats any other system. The account of a murder trial below is true, but the author has changed people’s names. D. Graham Burnett is a professor of history at Princeton University and an editor at Cabinet magazine, in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of several books, including A Trial By Jury and, most recently, Trying Leviathan. This article appears in the July 2009 issue of eJournal USA, “Anatomy of a Jury Trial.”

By D. Graham Burnett

What is it like to serve on a jury? Millions of Americans could answer this question, each in a different way. But that each of them has an answer — that each of them has stepped inside a courtroom, witnessed the unfolding of a trial, and finally sat in judgment on a fellow citizen — says a great deal about the ideals of openness and democracy to which we aspire in the United States.

The United States is not by any means a perfect nation, nor do we have anything like a perfect legal system, but our tradition of citizen juries provides a remarkable opportunity for ordinary Americans to participate in an intimate and challenging way in maintaining the rule of law and building a just society.

We must not romanticize this institution (it is important to remember that the vast majority of legal cases in the United States are resolved without going to a jury trial), and there is always a danger that excessive emphasis on the appealingly civic character of jury justice will distract us from larger structural and administrative features of American legal practice (such as plea bargaining). Nevertheless, anyone who wants to understand the way the law works in the United States must reckon with the jury and appreciate its role in the courts and in the lives of Americans — both those accused of crimes and those called to help decide their fate.

I am a historian, and I teach in an American university. My professional work deals with the history of science and technology from the 17th to the 20th century, and I have no formal legal expertise. About 10 years ago, however, I wrote a small book about my experience serving as the foreman of the jury in a Manhattan murder trial. This book, A Trial By Jury, received a good deal of attention for its depiction of a jury’s struggles to reach a verdict in a difficult case, and it continues to be read in law schools and by policy makers for insights into the ways juries work (and the ways they don’t!). My aim in what follows is to sketch briefly the story I tell in greater detail in that book and to offer a few reflections on what I learned from my jury experience.

A Grisly Killing

When the police kicked in the door of a small apartment in lower Manhattan in the summer of 1998, they found Randolph Cuffee on his face, collapsed in the corner under a window. He was very dead: More than 20 stab wounds gashed his upper back, neck, and the base of his skull. These were ugly, to be sure, but the fatal cut was in fact hidden: a single knife blow to the chest that had nicked Cuffee’s aorta; he would have lived for only a matter of minutes after receiving that injury.

By the time I found myself sitting in a juror’s seat in a Manhattan courtroom two years later, looking at photographs of the body presented by the prosecution, the police had also found the young man who wielded the knife: Monte Milcray, who sat looking straight ahead before the bench with his lawyer. Milcray claimed that he had been walking along the street in New York City one day and met a handsome young woman who struck up a conversation and offered him her phone number, suggesting they might meet up again sometime. Taking her up on the offer, he phoned her one evening and received directions to her apartment in Greenwich Village. When he got there, she showed him into a small and dimly lit room where they sat on a couch and watched a suggestive television program.

Only when they started to undress, however, did Milcray realize that his new acquaintance wasn’t a woman at all, but rather a man — a man who stood between him and the door. According to Milcray, what happened next was an attempted male-on-male rape. In the struggle, Milcray drew a small pocketknife from his trousers and stabbed his assailant, first in the chest and then, folded in an unwanted embrace, again and again in the back. When Randolph Cuffee collapsed, Milcray made a dash for the door and escaped.

This, at any rate, was one of the stories he told. There were several.

Initially, fleeing into the crowded streets of the city with blood all over his body (he had nearly severed his pinky finger while swinging the knife), Milcray had begged help from passersby and found his way to a hospital, claiming to have been attacked by a gang of white men who had beaten him up (both Milcray and Cuffee were black). Only later, when police picked him up from the hospital and confronted him as a suspect in Cuffee’s murder, did he admit that he had been the killer, giving as his confession this fantastic story of seduction and mistaken identity. (Locating Milcray was good police guesswork: Detectives always canvass local hospitals for people with hand wounds after a stabbing because it is very easy to cut oneself while repeatedly whacking someone with a knife.) As it happens, when he took the stand in court to defend himself against the murder charge, Milcray modified his story yet again, alleging that he had in fact first met Cuffee in a phone-chat dating system, but sticking to the part about thinking Cuffee was a she and the part about the attempted rape.

Summoned to Duty

How did I find myself entangled with all this unpleasantness? Well, as a good citizen I had simply registered to vote. That was all it took to set the bureaucratic wheels turning. In those days my wife and I were subletting a friend’s apartment, having recently finished our schooling and just embarked on our professional lives: My wife was working as a grassroots political organizer, and I was trying to turn my doctoral dissertation into a book, in the hopes of finding a teaching job.

We were both very busy, so I was plenty irritated when the notice came through the mail slot informing me that I was required to turn up for jury duty at the court building just south of where we lived. I grumbled, but I went and sat around in the vast waiting area for a day or so as names were pulled out of a big lottery roller and people were shuffled off to the different courtrooms.

When my name came up, I still thought it was unlikely I would actually end up on a jury because every potential juror was required to go through a process known as voir dire, in which the lawyers and judge ask a set of questions to get a “feel” for one’s suitability to serve on the case. There are various ways to get bumped from the process (for instance, if you say you are a racist or too afraid, or if you already have a strong opinion about the case), and I assumed I would be deemed unsuitable in one way or another.

But no. Even though I answered many questions in an opinionated way (for instance, I said that I objected to the death penalty and that I was not sure I could in good conscience convict a defendant who might be put to death by the state), I was kept on to serve, and indeed, made the head of my jury of 12 very different Americans: four men, eight women; nine whites, two blacks, and a Hispanic; about half under age 30; about half professionals of one sort or another. We would get to know each other very well over the three weeks that followed.

It is impossible for me to rehearse all the twists and turns of the testimony we heard, or to reproduce the intensity of the four days we spent together in sequestered deliberations about our verdict. In serious cases such as ours, it is not uncommon for juries to be kept in something like state custody as they work to achieve consensus about the case — and so we were not allowed to go home and not allowed to talk with our families throughout the 66 hours of our final decision making. We were escorted to our meals by armed court officers and kept in hotels overnight, attended by guards.

All this was much more than a cheerful civics lesson; it was a disorienting encounter with the power of the state and the ugly matter at hand. In our crucible, behind the closed doors of the jury room, we struggled to understand our responsibilities and to make sense of a vast amount of conflicting and complicated evidence. There were tears and fights, soulful silences, talks about God and gays and truth and justice. It was democratic deliberation raised to the level of an extreme sport.

The Verdict

Above all, we labored to understand what it meant that the state had to prove its case “beyond a reasonable doubt.” It is a very high standard. And when a defendant claims to have been acting in self-defense, the burden of proof remains on the state, which must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was not doing so. Two men go into a room and one comes out, claiming to have been defending himself. No witnesses. No evidence of previous violent crime by either party. Who can say “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the survivor is lying?

We couldn’t. And, in the end, we acquitted.

Not that we were happy about it. We didn’t like the defendant. We thought it likely that he was lying about the whole thing. We thought it quite possible that he had simply murdered Cuffee, who may well have been his lover. But we also realized we hadn’t been asked what we thought was possible or likely. We had been asked what had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Was justice done in our courtroom? Frankly, I am not at all sure it was. Did we apply the law as we were instructed? I believe we did. A verdict of “not guilty” — we reminded ourselves as we left the jury room — does not mean innocent.

Why was the burden of proof so very high? We learned a great deal about that through our jury service itself since we glimpsed in our own loss of freedom for four long days of sequestration the shadow of the terrifying power of the state — against which, finally, every citizen has only other citizens for defense. That, for me, was the deepest lesson of my jury service.  And it is one I will never forget.

People sometimes ask me if I think the jury system works. I have come to answer that question in a paraphrase of Winston Churchill’s famous quip about democracy, which he called the worst form of government, except for all the rest. To build a society we must punish each other for crimes. Who should make that possibly fatal decision? In the United States the answer is “a jury of peers.” It certainly isn’t always pretty, but are the alternatives better? Are you sure?

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.