Winston Churchill once said, "Democracy
is the worst form of government except all the others that have been
tried." I feel the same way
about the jury system. I came to this
conclusion during my first service as a juror over fifty years ago and haven't
changed it since. A recent summons
to jury duty reminded me of that initial experience.
At the time I was a
resident of Los Angeles County. In
those days in LA, and maybe even now, one was called to jury duty for a month,
and had to show up every weekday whether or not then empaneled in a jury. (I now live in Alameda County, where
one is summoned for just one day of service at a time, and dismissed if not
picked then for a jury—much more efficient for the citizen if not the county.)
I spent most of those
thirty days in LA in a jury assembly room waiting to be called for possible
inclusion in juries. (I eventually
served on about a half dozen.)
That seemingly interminable waiting none the less had a big payoff for
me in the form of a splendid civics lesson. As I talked at length with many of the other potential
jurors, I was able to assay the raw human material of juries; it was of course
diverse and it was not always impressive.
Much more importantly, I soon discovered an amazing feature of the jury
system: When assembled into a jury, that undifferentiated raw material is
magically metamorphosed by a strange alchemy, as if it were an admixture of
lesser metals transmuted into pure gold.
The backdrop of my civics
lesson was the notorious Caryl
Chessman case, which after a dozen years was reaching a final
resolution. Chessman had spent
most of his adult life in jail.
While on parole, he was arrested and charged with being the infamous
"red-light bandit," who followed cars to secluded areas and tricked
their occupants with his red spotlight into thinking he was a police
officer. When they pulled over, he
robbed and—in the case of several young women—raped them.
Chessman was convicted in
1948 and condemned to death under California's "Little Lindbergh Law,"
which allowed capital punishment for kidnapping if it also involved bodily
harm. In this case, the dragging
of one of the women a few feet from her car was deemed by a court to be
kidnapping.
Chessman always maintained
his innocence and spent twelve years on appeals, acting as his own attorney and
also laying out his arguments in four books that became best sellers. His case was an international cause
cèlébre, involving appeals on his behalf by such notables as Eleanor Roosevelt
and Billy Graham.
By 1960, Chessman's legal
appeals had deflected eight execution deadlines. In mid-February of that year, then-Governor Pat Brown (the
father of present Governor Jerry Brown) had issued another sixty-day stay of
execution, which was about to expire as my jury term began. The story was in the newspapers every
day, and little was talked about in the jury assembly room other than whether
Governor Brown should commute the sentence to life imprisonment or let the
execution proceed. I remember
being shocked at how many potential jurors were impatient with the slow process
of justice, feeling that the case should long since have been over and done
with. "Just kill the
bastard!" was a common opinion.
When I first heard that
sentiment, I had not yet served on a jury. It gave me a sense of foreboding. Here were people with whom I might serve, and many of
them—especially the least informed—seemed to me to be irrationally and
emotionally baying for an execution.
If I were to serve on a jury with any of them, how would they act?
I need not have worried,
for the metamorphosis I have mentioned always manifested itself. In every jury on which I served, my
fellow jurors carefully examined evidence. They cogently and articulately argued their viewpoints. They respectfully listened to
others. They tried to identify
with plaintiffs and defendants. They resisted being intimidated by judges and attorneys. Above all, they seemed to have a
reverence for their temporary but sovereign roles as personifications of the
ideal of justice.
I have seen the same
alchemy in operation every time in the last five decades I have served on a
jury. Jurors from every
profession, spanning the whole range of education, of all ages, coming from
every social condition, in each case unite in trying to determine the facts of
a case and render a true and just verdict. It never fails to impress me.
On the other hand, my
opinion of judges and lawyers has tumbled each time. I have often found judges to be peremptory, impatient, and
inured to the plights of those who appear before them—I suppose they are
toughened by seeing
too much of the worst of human nature over too many years. And I have rarely found lawyers to be
either seekers of truth or high-minded advocates—I suppose they cannot be in
our adversarial system of justice.
So, if I am ever
unfortunate enough to be a defendant in a criminal case, or even only a party
in a civil suit, I would willingly place myself in the hands of my peers. They
will of course be fallible human beings, but I would count on that miraculous
alchemy to transform them into ones who are as impartial as human beings can
be. I'd bet my life on it.
Postscript: Although nominally
opposed to the death penalty,
Governor Brown did not commute Chessman's death sentence. He was executed on May 2, 1960, just as
a new stay from a judge was being phoned to the prison's warden. (The judge's secretary had originally
misdialed the number, delaying delivery of the stay by a few critical
minutes.) In 1977, the U.S.
Supreme Court struck down kidnapping as a capital offense.