by Renee Rodin
We were ushered away by a fiftyish, mild-mannered, affable, gun-toting officer who could easily have stepped off the set of the Andy Griffith Show. Sheriff Todd even had a bit of a drawl. He led us down into a basement, through a byzantine maze of corridors and into an elevator up to our break room, which was just across the hall from where the trial would be held.
The break room, where we’d be whenever court wasn’t in session, contained a large conference table with twelve chairs around it, a fully equipped kitchen and also a bathroom. If there’d been beds we could have lived there. Sheriff Todd briefed us about what to expect in terms of procedure, how long our days would be, etc. It was noon and my stomach was rumbling. My only question was when would we eat?
We’d all be given a ten-dollar daily food allowance. Those of us with jobs would have our regular salary paid by employers; the rest of us would be paid twenty dollars a day. Since the trial was estimated to last ten days, those of us without jobs could count on making about three hundred dollars, if we brown-bagged it.
Every subsequent day we met at nine-thirty on the ground floor of the courthouse to be escorted through the bowels of the building, so no one could see us, up to our break room where we were locked in. Sherriff Todd and his gun would sit outside guarding the door until we were brought into court at ten. That the authorities thought we needed so much protection began to make me nervous.
On the first day, just before the trial was to begin, once Sheriff Todd confirmed that all the jurors felt well, he excused the two alternates. Then his demeanour changed and he barked, “While you’re in court you are never to make a move on your own, only as a group, and never without my permission. Understand?” It was not a question but an order to which we all submitted in shocked unison.
In the courtroom we met the trial’s presiding judge who was in his seventies with a ruddy complexion and twinkly eyes behind rimless glasses. He didn’t seem puffed up with authority like the first judge. Though he too sat on a high chair, him I wanted to give a cookie.
We were each handed twenty-three-page booklets of instructions so we could follow along as he read aloud from it. Much of his exposition was based on “reasonable doubt.” The prosecution would never be able to prove its case one hundred percent but it was up to us to think reasonably and fill in the blanks.
The judge read, “Logic can be brilliant but it is never a replacement for truth.” We were to use our intelligence and practical life experience. We were to presume nothing and to stay open to everything we heard and saw. Two-thirds of the way through the booklet the judge told us that Madam X was accused of smuggling into the country thirty pounds of pure heroin worth approximately $10,000,000 on the street. Upon hearing this one of the jurors jumped up and ran out of the courtroom.
Sheriff Todd picked up his dropped jaw, bustled the rest of us into our break room, locked us in and rushed off to find the AWOL juror vomiting into a wastepaper basket. When they returned I said, “My stomach lurched too. That amount of heroin is sickening.” Wary faces swung my way as if I were setting up an exit strategy. A couple of jurors tried to convince the jittery juror that he’d feel better if he stayed. But he simply couldn’t stand it, he needed out.
One of the alternates had a cellphone so he was quickly recalled to come on board. Otherwise a mistrial would have been declared and the long process of selecting a jury would have had to start from scratch. Once again twelve of us sat in the jury box listening to the judge read, from the beginning, his twenty-three pages of instructions.
By now his throat was hoarse and he often had to stop to sip water. At the point where he mentioned the value of the drugs Madam X had been accused of smuggling we all tensed. But no one took off. By the end of his reading, the judge was speaking in a whisper.
Our group consisted of a carpenter, an opera singer, a student, a physiotherapist, a homemaker, an engineer, a computer programmer, a fisherman, a furniture designer, a bowling alley owner and a waiter, though he immediately told us his real income came from gambling, and me. We ranged in age from early twenties to late sixties. Five of us were women. Eight of us appeared to be people of colour. I look ambiguously ethnic so I’m often asked, “Where are you from?” which is code for “what race are you?” Most of the people who’d been dismissed in the jury selection had been Caucasian.
The only reason the lawyers had asked us about our occupations was because they had to ask us something. But it was really our appearance that had been important, I assume to ensure there would be no grounds for charges of racism. The accused was a person of colour and had been born in a country far from Canada.
The first time we were alone together, Frieda, a vivacious physiotherapist, announced that she came from the same culture as the accused; that she’d recently been disowned by her father for cropping her long hair and that her mother had died the year before. The rest of us were caught off balance because she was revealing so much personal information to a group of strangers. Then she told us she badly wanted to be foreperson, the one who chairs the meetings and announces the verdict, and since no one else wanted that task there was no contest—we handed it to her.
Another immediate star was Cleo, an opera singer, who’d given birth four months earlier, and could easily have got out of jury duty. But she was probably so exhausted from looking after her new baby, she was glad to have a break. Cleo was bursting with pizzazz and milk and we were all besotted by her. Twice a day Sherriff Todd led her into a private room so she could pump milk for her husband to pick up to feed their baby.
What to wear, what to wear? All of us ended up in jeans. Madam X continued wearing her nondescript jogging suit. But no drab outfit could detract from her very attractive face. The defence and prosecutor swished around in their long black robes, white shirts and cut-out collars. Unlike Law & Order (I’ve seen so many re-runs I can chant the lines) where the lawyers come right up to the jurors to drive their point home, when these lawyers had to address us they stood in an area twenty feet away. This kept their words dry and our focus on the facts.
The first time the prosecution and defence locked heads, I almost fell off my chair when the judge instructed one of them to “go talk to your friend about it.” Apparently the lawyers are referred to as “friends,” though in court, and maybe out of it, they are mortal enemies. When they had to wrangle about whether a piece of evidence was admissible, the jury was booted out of the courtroom, though everyone else was allowed to stay.
The room was totally open to the public. Field trips of elementary school kids traipsed through accompanied by watchful teachers. There were also high school and law students, enforcement officers and anyone else who was interested in the case.
Each time we entered or left, the entire room, except for the judge, stood up for us. We were treated with all the respect and deference afforded de facto to judges, which is what we were, though none of us jurors wanted to acknowledge that onerous fact.
Despite our diverse ages and backgrounds, we were a magical mix. Sherriff Todd, seasoned as he was, had never seen such immediate bonding and asked several times, always with the same degree of incredulity in his voice, “Are you sure you didn’t know each other before?” He was always apologetic whenever he asked us to “tone it down”; because our raucous laughter could be heard in courtrooms down the long corridor.
As the mystery unfolded we analyzed and interpreted testimonies; predicted and second-guessed what we would hear next. We couldn’t wait to get back to our break room to bounce our theories around. Always we were aware of the performance level of the players, that we were being wooed into thinking perception was reality. We knew we were being watched like hawks by the lawyers to see what effect the various testimonies had on us. Justice seemed irrelevant. We were being asked to be persuaded by how well people spoke their lines. It was tempting to hold up scorecards like they do in figure skating.
Our days were relatively short, lasting from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. with breaks, still they wer
e grueling and we were exhausted by the end of them. Kibitzing aside, we concentrated scrupulously on everything that was presented to us: aware that the accused was part of a network of people, all of whom would be affected by our decision—that many fates were in our hands. Madam X’s only child, a ten-year-old girl, sat flanked by her grandmother and father, with her eyes glued on her mother. We pitied her suffering, to not be able to be comforted by or comforting to her mother. It hit home that we were the ones who might keep them apart for a long time.
At first during our down times, the women jurors talked about hormones, the men about hockey, until we arrived at something we could all relate to—food. Then we started to bring in treats to share, and joked about bringing in spiked drinks, even though we could be searched at any time. Soon enough our table was littered with juice containers, snacks, magazines, playing cards, jigsaw puzzles and our private notebooks, which we weren’t supposed to remove from the courthouse. I tore pages out of mine to take home.
Once we all went to eat lunch together at a nearby mall’s Food Court. The name amused us. While the rest of us stood in line at various kiosks, Gary the Gambler took off to buy lottery tickets. Another lunchtime as I was leaving the building I saw Madam X in the lobby, huddled by her traditionally dressed, wizened mother.
Her husband, clad in a spiffy leather jacket, strode over to them and she jumped up and began blasting him in a language I didn’t understand. He hung his head and took it silently. As soon as Madam X noticed I was nearby she stopped yelling, almost on a dime, and beamed at me. I beamed back. She was gorgeous.
In the courtroom she’d been making intense eye contact with me. “Help,” her expression begged, “Don’t let them do this to me.” I returned her gaze, trying to show empathy, it was the least I could do. I thought our eye-locking was our little secret until another juror asked, “Has she tried to catch anyone else’s eye aside from mine?” When we went around the table, everyone said she’d made eye contact with them.
I’d have done the exact same thing, gone from juror to juror appealing to them to save me. But hearing that she’d done it with all the other jurors disturbed me, and that made me establish some badly needed distance from her.
She was a school crossing guard and her husband had a small roofing business so we were curious about how her family could pay for her hotshot criminal lawyer. He was world-weary, pompous and arrogant, as if we were beneath his contempt if we couldn’t already see his client was innocent. Early on I felt he was there to obscure the truth. Good lawyers can make you believe the truth; great lawyers can make you believe the lie. The prosecutor had the open face of a true believer. He was low-keyed, earnest and boring.
Though they tried to suppress it, the customs officers who’d apprehended Madam X, squeaked with excitement when they testified. Catching this much heroin was a real coup for them. As Madam X was returning from a family wedding in her native land, a young customs intern’s intuition had kicked in. Something about Madam X felt wrong so she had her bags flagged for the next level of inspection. There the senior officer unwrapped a package of Madam X’s family photographs, and ran his finger along their frames. Placing it under an ionized wand, it tested positive for drugs.
“Have you been around heroin or cocaine,” he asked her.
“No,” she answered.
“Did you pack the bags yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why there are drugs in the frames?”
“I’ve been set up.”
The prosecutor made a big deal out of this repeated conversation. He insisted any innocent person, when asked if she knew why there were drugs in her luggage, would have answered, “I don’t know.” To him, her blurting out, “I’ve been set up,” meant Madam X knew there were drugs in the frames. He emphasized it took customs officers hours just to undo the fourteen framed photographs, so the drugs couldn’t have been stashed in the luggage without Madam X’s knowledge—they had to have been packed there way ahead of time.
Our courts are so clogged up that Madam X was tried four years after she’d been arrested. I remembered seeing an episode of Law & Order, a few months earlier, in which heroin was smuggled into the US in frames of religious pictures. The Afghan warlord involved had diplomatic immunity. I wondered if Madam X was also “connected,” and with whom she might have been in cahoots.
One day three hard-boiled mugs in sharkskin suits came in and sat prominently in the front row of the public seating area. They looked like the sole purpose for being there was to intimidate Madam X into not giving up their names to the police. If she were involved in drug running she was a small cog in a big machine. Her life and her family’s could well be in danger if she didn’t play by her employers’ rules.
Now Madam X sat as bolt upright as an exclamation point, following every word uttered. Unusual as it is for the accused to testify on her own behalf, her lawyer had her take the stand to convince us of her innocence, that she didn’t have a mens rea, a guilty mind. Her English was fine until the prosecutor asked, “Why have you only now suddenly begun making frequent trips to your homeland after years of not going there?” Incomprehension swept across her face.
Her lawyer stopped the proceedings to explain to us she couldn’t understand the word “frequent.” He wanted to portray her as a new and bewildered immigrant, though we knew she’d been raised and educated in Canada. The prosecutor tackled the issue from a different angle. He asked, “How can you possibly afford all the recent trips you’ve made to your faraway homeland on your salary as a school crossing guard and your husband’s small business income?”
Madam X’s eyes lit up as she said, “I save my own money and spend my husband’s.” We all giggled at the cliché of the wife who was careful with her own money but happy to use her husband’s. She hadn’t been able to resist playing to the audience and we were charmed. When we returned to our break room I said, “She got framed.” Three jurors rushed over to Gary the Gambler and money changed hands. He’d run a numbers game with them about who would be the first among the rest of us to make that pun.
In his closing argument the prosecutor ploddingly and methodically tied up his case. He said Madam X must have noticed how much heavier her luggage was with the thirty pounds of heroin in it. He questioned why she’d had the framing done while she was away. He said she’d never opened the packages before she left to make sure the work had been done properly was because it wasn’t her job to do that. A drug mule does only one thing—transports. He asked, “Who would entrust that amount of drugs to a total stranger? She must have been known by her suppliers.”
The prosecutor concluded by telling us that at the same time Madam X began making frequent trips back to her birthplace, she and her husband had each bought themselves new Jaguars. “What a waste,” I thought. If she had been a drug smuggler, why couldn’t she have done it because she desperately needed the money for a special medical procedure in another country or something else worthwhile?
Her lawyer tried to control the damage by explaining that in Madam X’s culture it was important to show off signs of wealth, that the Jaguar’s real function was tantamount to being seen as worthy of receiving respect. If appearances were so important I could just imagine what kind of a wardrobe Madam X had at home, and how she must have hated the cheesy jogging suit she’d probably been instructed by her lawyer to wear in court. I felt sorry for her again.
He closed his argument by emphasizing reasonable doubt and tapping into our insecurity. He said, “You have to act like God to feel certain about your decision.” I could feel our collective heart sink—playing God was an intimidating prospect for which none of us had signed on.
It was Friday afternoon and the judge told us to come back after the weekend with an overnight case in the event we’d have to spend a night at a hotel. We laughed this possibility off. Except for a couple of jurors, we got along like a house on fire. Arriving quickly at a unanimous decision would be a slam-dunk.
From then on we were sequestered, we were to have no contact with the outside world and be accompanied by guards every minute we weren’t actually deliberating. We re-entered our break room to find Madam X’s suitcases, which still smelled bad four years later, the documents, the photographs and frames—everything except for the actual drugs had been put there for us to examine ourselves.
The hardest to handle were the pictures of Madam X’s family at the wedding she said she’d gone home to attend, they were so personal. Until Cleo suggested maybe they weren’t even real, just fake for show. Come to think of it none of us thought to look for Madam X in any of the photos.
All our deliberations centred on credibility. The prosecutor had repeatedly explained that a drug mule does only one thing, transports. The notion that Madam X hadn’t opened any of the packages of framed photographs before she flew home immediately divided us. All the women jurors said they’d have checked the work no matter when the packages had been delivered; all of the men said they wouldn’t have bothered.
Though the majority of jurors’ first language wasn’t English, none of them believed Madam X had lived for decades in Canada and couldn’t understand “frequent,” the word that had confused her when she was asked how she could afford all the “frequent” trips back to her homeland. Most of us agreed it was a stall tactic to avoid having to account for her finances.