Philosophy.Of.Science.
I got called for jury duty on Wednesday. The major benefit was that I got to skip a week of Evo Psych pain; I'll be back in that class next week, but we'll be back to talking about cultural psychology which is not so flagrantly anti-biological. Yay! The major deficit was that I had to be downtown by 8:00 in the A.M., ready for an entire day of sitting around and waiting to be called. I got there just fine, walked to the courthouse, headed down to the juror assembly room and camped in my chair with a couple of books to read for class. The juror assembly room was huge - they bring in about 50 prospective jurors per trial, so there was space enough for about 400 people at a given time. Just a bureaucratic nightmare.
They started off the day with an orientation session that involved watching a ten minute ridiculo-video. After giving us a Law & Order-level explanation of what was happening and repeatedly insisting that "the process can't occur without you, so you are making JUSTICE happen, and it will be AWESOME," we were then treated to testimonials from people who claimed that it was all "really interesting" and you get to "see the process" and "feel proud to be an American." I mean, it's not exactly shocking that a government institution would throw out some nationalistic sentiment or that they would spend a large amount of time convincing you that this was not so much inconvenient as it was AWESOME, but it was a little dumb - way too much positive attitude insistence when really, it's your duty - it's not going to be SUPER FUN, it's going to be inconvenient, and you are required to do it: deal. I don't mean to poo-poo a positive attitude, it's that nine out of ten minutes of the orientation video were spent adjusting my attitude rather than giving me a little insight into the process of jury selection.
Ah, well. Eventually, the orientation video ended, and they decided to put on a DVD in the main juror assembly room to entertain us while we awaited bailiffs to escort us to courtrooms (if we were so lucky). And you'll never guess what the movie was: Miss Congeniality! I will flash forward and reveal that later in the afternoon when I ended up back in the juror assembly room, the in-wait entertainment was Madagascar! So the same movies that Beck uses for airplane flights are used to pacify angry waiting jurors. I will permit you to draw your own conclusions...
There's a quiet room in the JAR if you aren't inclined to see MC for the eighteenth time, and since I had a lot of reading I should have been doing, I booked it over there. And here's the catch of the day - even though you have to wait around for HOURS, you can't get any reading done, because bailiffs are coming in and grabbing groups of fifty - so the receptionists have to read off fifty names over the loudspeaker. Even when the bailiffs aren't there, the receptionists are welcoming the new jurors as they arrive. So there were ten minute stretches in which I can read, constantly interrupted by welcoming messages and then reading of lists of names that I had to pay attention to lest I miss my calling. On about the fifth bailiff who came in, I was called third in the group. Having read maybe 20 pages in the two hours I had been there, I joined a mass of people and prepared myself to be herded to the courtroom. Lots of stupid jokes, Southwest Airlines stewardess humor, really, employed by the bailiff with the mass of people as we made our way across the courthouse.
We finally got to the courtroom, and the bailiff explained the procedure a bit more - we each had a placard with our number, and if we were answering a question, we were to raise our placard and not use our name in order to keep the process moving along. We then filed into the courtroom, and since I was third in line, I got to sit in the real life juror box. I quickly figured out that being in the first 12, I was much more likely to be selected - they brought in all the extra people in case jurors needed to be excused, but had we all been found acceptable, the first twelve would have been taken. Super duper, I thought, as I really didn't want to spend the next week there.
In the courtroom sat a clerk, a court stenographer, the bailiff, a prosecutor and his assistant, and the defense lawyer / defendant. It took approximately 0.14 seconds to figure out who the defendant was - everyone had their stereotypes on in full force, with the lady in a power suit, the stern man in a three piece, and the strange-faced man in crumply khaki next to the power-suited lady all being exactly who you might think. There were a good few awkward minutes of staring in silence as we waited for the judge to appear. Very modern looking courtroom with computer monitors in front of the jurors, the bench, the witness stand, and the lawyers; PA system with mics mounted everywhere. A little more sharper imagey than your average scene from Law & Order - even the jurors' chairs were captain's deck worthy.
The judge walked in and said "Be seated" before the bailiff had a chance to finish saying "session." This guy was all business, a buzz-cut coke glasses-wearer straight out of a 1950s engineering firm. He gave us a quick summary of what was to happen - he would ask us yes or no questions, and if the answer to any of them were yes, we were to raise our placard and explain. Then he would ask each of us questions individually, and then if the lawyers had any questions they would ask us. He quickly ran through the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" and then let us know that if we had to vote right now, we'd have to find the defendant not guilty. He quickly explained the crime of which the defendant was accused - it was a burglary charge at B______________. Interestingly, the judge thought the trial would only take a couple of days, something I could have done with minimal interference to my studies. So I was not as opposed to serving as I otherwise would have been. Then he hit us with the gamut of questions:
Do you recognize the defendant? Do you recognize any of the lawyers or court officers? Do you know any of the other jurors? Do you know the police officers involved? Do you have any relationship to B_____________? Have you ever been convicted of a crime? Have any of your relatives been involved in a burglary? Have you ever been the victim of a burglary? Are you a lawyer, or do you study law? Are you not a U.S. Citizen, a citizen of Maricopa county, etc.? Is there any other reason you could not be a fair, impartial member of a jury? There were a slew of other questions, but they all had the "obvious reasons someone would be biased flavor." The judge qualified as all of this as not an act of prying into people's lives, just trying to ensure that jury is as fair as possible.
The amazing thing is that the ocean of human tragedy, invited, relevant or otherwise, quickly hit high tide. Prospective jurors started telling tales of their children being in jail, being arrested for DUI, being held up at gunpoint, daughters being convicted of narcotics possession, having brain damage, not speaking English well, you name it. I couldn't begin to detail the litany of private, typically socially regretful information that poured out of people. Terrible stories, and a brutal sensation of seeing state power in action - the judge had oh-so-passively forced the tales of woe out of people. We were under oath, true, but the level of detail that came out was certainly not required. Some of it was frivolous - we got to hear about how a man had his snow board stolen out of his garage 30 years ago - but most was just sad and overtold: friends murdered, broken families, cousins with meth problems, egads. I've often gotten the feeling walking around campus that when you see a huge mass of people, you start seeing statistically determined "all kinds" - people with broken bones, foreign accents, different styles, heights, weights, etc., you just see the whole bell curve at once, so when you run into the 6'8" guy with a mohawk, there's something about it that just isn't all that shocking. But this was narrative overflow straight from the horses' mouths - at times, I forgot I was in a jury selection process and just thought I was witnessing mass confession, mass therapy.
The judge, of course, followed up every tale with, "Will this make you unable to be fair while serving on this jury?" All business - there seemed to be a certain level of probing he was required to do, but once he got there, he just stopped. The most painful part of the entire experience was a gentleman with brain damage - he clearly had no business being involved in jury selection, having sustained head trauma two months before which had left him with a bad speech impediment, but the judge had to get details of the circumstances to clarify that he was unfit to serve. That he was unfit was clear by the time it had taken fifteen seconds for him to get three words out - but we all sat there and watched as this man struggled to explain his circumstances in front of a judge, lawyers, and 49 other strangers / prospective jurors. Eventually the exasperated judge muttered something along the lines of, "Okay, I think get it..."
My favorite part of the ordeal came after the general questions, when the judge began asking us one by one "what do you do, what does your spouse (if you have one) do, and have you ever served on a jury before?" I was third in this process - the people in front of me were a grocery store cashier and a retail salesman, respectively. I had pretty much dreaded this part the entire time, knowing that explaining my particular program was going to be challenging. And with all the severe truth-telling going on in the room, there was a tense atmosphere before I began responding to the qs - yeah, I could feel my heart beating. I'll try to give the conversation accurately:
"What do you do? * I am a PhD student at Arizona State in the philosophy of science. * What's that? * (Struggling mightily not to use words like "epistemology" or "meta-ethics" and the like, knowing these would just beget more "what's that?" type questions) I study how scientists justify their claims, how they convince others that they know what they claim to know. * Like the Theory of Evolution? * Right - we would look at the historical development of the theory and particularly how scientists use EVIDENCE to justify their claims * And what do you do with that? * Usually academia: education and research. It also interacts with justifying government research grants and the like. * And your spouse? * She's a veterinarian, and no, I've never served on a jury before. * Okay, thank you."
I capitalize EVIDENCE not because I shouted it, but because if "philosophy of science" got the lawyers' attention, the word EVIDENCE hit the resonant frequency of their brains. The judge continued to ask everyone in the room questions, and there were no other academics in the room - everyone else was the predictable mix of teachers, engineers, salespeople, clerks, administrative assistants, unemployed, the usual. After everyone had answered the questions, the judge tossed out a few jurors on face - some who couldn't speak English, the man with brain damage, one lady with fifteen relatives who had done everything from burglarize to deal crack. Then the lawyers asked to approach - and as they whispered to the judge, he clicked a button that turned on a white noise machine over the PA so we couldn't hear. 21st century law baby - they don't do that on Law & Order, no they do NOT!!!
So the lawyers then got to ask questions, and the prosecution decided to interrogate only one person. Guess who...
"Do you think your studies will affect your ability to render a verdict? * Well, different contexts require a different set of standards - I recognize that you can't use the same sort of standards in in a courtroom or everyday life as you do in philosophy. So no, I think I can render a verdict according to the appropriate standards of the courtroom. * What standards do you use?1 * Um, that depends on the context - again, I know the standards in a court room are different from that of rigorous philosophy, so i would follow the rule of "reasonable doubt." * So you could put aside your studies and consider the evidence in the way that the judge instructs you? * Certainly. * Can you give me an example of how you might study evidence that pertains to a criminal trial? * Sure, I took a law, science, & technology course, and one of the things we studied was how expert witnesses verify their expertise. * So would you be inclined to believe an expert on the witness stand? * Well, that would depend on the kind of expert, their credentials, etc. * Okay, thank you.
And then the prosecution rested. Awesome. And then, the defense's turn. And guess who... ah, you already know.
So you study scientific evidence - what kinds? * My department is within the biology department, but really, all kinds of scientific evidence. * So you're familiar with fingerprint analysis and DNA testing? * Yes, I mean, not directly - but I've taken genetics courses and know the rationale behind them, nucleotide polymorphisms and such. * So would you be inclined to believe an expert witness on DNA analysis? * Um, again, it would depend on the type of witness, credentials, how the samples were collected, * Okay, thank you.
And she talked to one other juror who had mentioned possibly being biased against an alleged burglar, but then stopped. So of all those witnesses, my "philosophy of science" and "evidence" lines grabbed by far the most attention. And both sides seemed not to want me around - the prosecution, I presume, because I was never going to believe their evidence, and the defense because I would know exactly what was going on with whatever DNA evidence was going to be presented against her client. Rather than throw me out of there on the spot, as would have made ABSOLUTE SENSE, the judge called an hour recess for lunch. So I got to hang out in the courthouse cafeteria for an hour, awaiting my already known fate.
We were instructed to meet back at 12:58 for the 1:00 trial - and just to up the goofiness of the day a little more, when I got to the lobby with the other jurors, there we all were standing in maybe a 200 square foot space... along with the defendant and his family. HUH? They don't control this type of thing? No one was there instructing us not to speak with him, not to watch his tearful family as they hugged him goodbye... whatever, court.
We walked back in the courtroom, another "All ri /Be seated," and the judge proceeded to read off the list of selected juror numbers. Juror 1 had been tossed under the 15 criminal family member clause of jury duty, I suppose, so the list started with "2" and then went something like "4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,14,15." I had been, predictably, tossed out on the basis of my high-falutin' ideas about evidence and DNA. The judge dismissed the rest of us, and told us we could go home. HUZZAH!
Not so fast - we got back to the jury assembly room and were informed that we had to wait to see if we were needed for another trial. UGH. Super-Ugh, because when I sat down at a table with my book - which I was READING - one of the other rejected jury members sat down by me and said, "You study science, right? Well, let me tell you about my boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend and their baby so you can tell me about his psychology I'm 7 months pregnant and I just think you can't live in the future if you live in the past I mean how can you move forward if you're still thinking about her and he used to drugs and I told him if he ever fell back that it was over but he hasn't but now he's living in the past again and I think it's just a matter of time and how long have you been married, do you have up days and down days because we do but I love him but just sometimes AGH and don't you think that's fucked up because I mean I told him no sex ever again if you don't stop living in the past..."
Oh. My. Goodness. I am not exaggerating; like my courtroom dialogues, those are not the exact words in the exact order, but they are very close. Luckily, after about half an hour of this CRAZY LADY they called us up and dismissed us - I think I actually said "YES!" when they did, not because I got to go home but because I got to get away from that lady who apparently thought courtroom therapy time was still in session. I walked briskly to my car and left the world of jury duty behind - I am off for at least 18 months now by law.
So that's the tale, and the take home message is that if you want to get tossed off a jury during the selection process, just say you have a passing interest in philosophy of science and evidence and apparently you will be a potentially prejudiced wahoo to lawyers on both sides. But try to do it in a way that does not make psychotic strangers think you want to talk to them about every excruciating detail of their life. Because wow, you don't.
1 This may have been my favorite question, because I still have no idea how I was supposed to answer this. I mean, outside of "reasonable doubt" or "absolute doubt" or something like that, how do you answer "what standards do you use?" Um, the blue ones? WTF?
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