A Trial by Jury

by D. Graham Burnett

  This caused a tremor of anxiety. We would all need to speak? About what? Surely this had something to do with our note to the court. What would the judge do? The feeling of solidarity had become too strong, however, for these thoughts to cause much concern. In fact, it felt very much as if part of the new spirit of unity among us proceeded directly from the mischievous sense that we had, together, done something that stretched the rules, that we had found a way to talk back to a judge (in particular) and to the system (in general) so set on restricting our voices over the last weeks. Dean joked that he was looking forward to a chance to speak his mind in the open court. Several others took courage.

  Then the call came. Thomas Mackelwee appeared, and asked if I had filled out the verdict sheet (the formal document with the list of charges and a double column of boxes to check—guilty/not guilty), and I said I had. It was in my pocket. We entered the courtroom.

  After we had taken our seats, the judge spoke. “Mr. Burnett, I have your note here, and I am going to read it to the court.” He did so strangely, without the least trace of inflection, slowly, mechanically, pausing momentarily after each word as if to strip the sentences of meaning:

  “ ‘We the jury wish it to be known to the open court that we feel most strongly that the strict application of the law to the facts established by the evidence in this case does not lead to a truly just verdict. We have, however, reached a verdict in accordance with our charge.’

  “Have I read that correctly, Mr. Burnett?”

  I said he had.

  “According to our legal system,” he continued, “a verdict must be in accordance with the law and it must be true. Do you understand that, Mr. Burnett?”

  I said I did.

  “I want you to answer this question, Mr. Burnett, by saying yes or no, nothing more. Has the jury reached a verdict?”

  I said yes.

  The judge turned to Thomas Mackelwee, the associate clerk of count, and asked him to begin. He approached me, requested the verdict sheet, and took it to the podium. In response to the judge’s prompting questions, the clerk announced, charge by charge, what we had found.

  “On the charge of murder in the second degree with intent, how finds the jury?”

  “Not guilty.”

  I looked at Milcray, whose head was resting against his hands, clasped in front of him, his elbows on the table. His head dropped when the answer came.

  “On the charge of murder in the second degree under the theory of depraved indifference, how finds the jury?”

  “Not guilty.”

  His head dropped farther, and a distinct wailing went up from the back of the room.

  “On the charge of manslaughter, how finds the jury?”

  “Not guilty.”

  And Milcray looked straight up, with tears streaming down his face, and his fists clenched in the air before his throat.

  The wailing from the back of the room grew louder.

  The defense attorney showed no emotion; the prosecutors sat impassive.

  I could hear sobbing in the jury box behind me and to my left. The judge spoke more words, the clerk spoke more words. I was asked a question. Was this the verdict of the jury. . . ?

  I said it was, aware that the moment was collapsing for me, that I was not able to maintain any distance from what was happening, that I was no longer seeing what was going on.

  The attorneys approached the bench for a conference, and we were told that the jury would be polled. Each of us would be asked to affirm the verdict individually. Did I speak? I do not remember. In my mind I hear Leah, to my left. She answered the question clearly: yes, this was her verdict. Then Jim. Yes. He spoke shortly, without a trace of hesitation. Then Jessica. Yes.

  And so it went. I watched Milcray, who had again frozen in a posture of silent expectation, his head against his hands, which were again clasped in front of him, his elbows propped on the table edge. The tears were visible, dripping down his nose onto the table. His head again dropped, slightly, each time an answer came: Yes. Yes.

  Once Adelle, behind me, had spoken, the thing felt done. But five answers remained. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

  And it was over. We had let him go.

  The judge addressed us briefly. He thanked us for our work, but not effusively. Rather, it was a backhanded thanks, which began by pointing out that in peacetime jury duty constituted the most extensive commitment demanded of citizens. It was a service to the country, he acknowledged, but it was by no means a service comparable in scope to that which had been demanded of the men of his generation, many of whom had been asked to give up not a few weeks, but years, and in too many cases had given up their very lives. We were to be thanked for what we had done. But we ought not leave with a disproportionate sense of the service we had rendered to the republic. Good day.

  He was right. I felt, dimly, a new respect for him, a sympathy for his perpetual irritation with the parade of self-indulgent New Yorkers who passed under his bench.

  As I stood to let fellow jurors file out in front of me, my eyes fell on the prosecutors. My instinct was to avert my gaze, out of a sense of decorum, not wishing them to see me looking on at their defeat. But at the same moment I realized that my wandering eyes might be interpreted as an unwillingness to look them in the face, as a sign of some uneasiness with the thing we had just done. This would not do. So I made full eye contact, and held it. No sooner had I done so than my initial hesitation blossomed unexpectedly into icy Schadenfreude, a feeling of euphoria, a delight at their failure. It had all failed—the mocking tone, the histrionics with the knife, the obsequies and sarcasm. I turned and followed the others out the door.

  Back in the deliberation room, hasty promises bounced back and forth as people scrambled to collect their things: we would meet up again; a reunion, perhaps; let’s stay in touch. The sense of exhilaration had not subsided, but neither had people’s urgency to walk free from the whole affair. Walking free had taken on a new meaning for all of us. The sergeant stuck his head in without warning: we were free to go, but we had a last decision to make. We could go out the front (walking down the public hall to the public elevators), or out the back, where we would be escorted by a court officer, and would be assured of avoiding anyone who had been in the court. Also, those who wished could talk with the lawyers, who often stayed around and were sometimes interested in hearing from jurors.

  We split on this, four or five of us deciding to walk out the front, and the rest preferring to go the other way. For my part, I had no desire to speak with anyone, but I never wanted to wonder if I had taken the back way because of some uneasiness about facing the family of the victim. They—the brothers, sisters, a pastor, and a set of friends and supporters—had been present for every moment of the weeks of testimony, lining their bench each time we emerged from our deliberations, showing us their lengthening faces. I could well imagine what was going on in their heads each time we requested more evidence, or sought clarification on some quibbling specificity of the legal language in the charge. They must have thought the world had gone crazy: there lay the knife; there was the man who had swung it; what more could we possibly need?

  I wanted to prove to myself that I felt right enough about what we had just done that I could pass through them and could countenance whatever they wanted to say or do.

  And so, after sixty-six hours of confinement, I put on my coat, shouldered my duffel bag, and proceeded down the narrow corridor that led along the side of the courtroom, linking the jury room to the main hall of the court building. I was not alone, but the group of us who had chosen the front exit neither walked together nor spoke as we made our way out.

  In the end, I had prepared myself for more drama than we found. The prosecutor and his assistant were nowhere to be seen. Milcray and his lawyer had not yet left the courtroom. As I passed the double door I could see them through the small window, making their way up the aisle. The victim’s family, I suddenly remembered, had begun leaving the courtroom be
fore the judge had finished his closing remarks. It had been foolish of me to think that I would see them here, in this long green corridor, as I had so many times before, huddled together on the low benches that served as the court’s only waiting area. In fact, the hall was almost abandoned, dingy, and poorly lit. It was, after all, late morning on a Saturday.

  Two women approached, recognizable as members of Milcray’s family. One I took to be his fiancée, who had appeared several times in the courtroom and had shaken her head skeptically at damning testimony; the other was an older woman I took to be her mother. The younger woman was carrying a child. As I walked past them to the elevator, the older woman began to thank me, and to point to the child, calling out weepily, “See, this is his baby! This is his little baby!”

  Something in the drama rang false, and it goaded me into the elevator after a quick nod. The idea I had taken into my head as I left the jury room—that I ought to give the twelve index cards to Milcray, because they belonged to him, because for him they would have deep significance, because he would understand that they had given him back his life and that they were therefore a precious relic, a sacramental folio—all of this evaporated in the hollow moment of melodrama in the hallway. The twelve cards remained in my pocket, where I had put them when I threw out everything else on the table, cleaning up before I walked out.

  Arriving home, I found my wife waiting anxiously. She had gotten back from her trip late the night before, and had spent the morning calling around fruitlessly to figure out in what court building I might be found, so that she could try to bring me anything I needed. We sat together for a while, and I was reluctant to attempt to begin the story of what had happened. So we were quiet.

  Then the phone rang. We let the machine get it, but I heard a familiar voice. It was Leah Tennent. I picked it up, somewhat shaky, and said hello.

  Her news overwhelmed, brought great relief, cut me adrift.

  She had stayed to talk with Milcray’s lawyer, and he had told her that he had fought in pretrial motions to have evidence admitted concerning Cuffee’s prior record. What the defense had found was a complaint filed by a young man who alleged that Cuffee had molested him. The case had been dropped because the alleged victim refused to press charges, and the evidence had not been admitted because it was judged “more prejudicial than probative.”

  In the complaint, the young man alleged Cuffee had enticed him to the apartment by posing as a woman and soliciting sex.

  “Oh God,” I mumbled into the phone, my eyes closed tight, the space inside my head large, dizzying.

  “Oh my God . . .”

  EPILOGUE

  _______________________________

  103 Corlears Street

  In the weeks that followed, I tried to return to regular life. I started going back to my office at the humanities center, and even vetted a few of the illustration captions for my book. I rescheduled a trip overseas that I had been forced to cancel when the trial dragged into a third week.

  Still, things did not really feel the same. Life had been weirdly sapped of its vitality and importance; my work seemed bizarre and insignificant. Conversation with colleagues at lunch—about books, about the progress of our research, about a columnist several of us disliked—pained me immensely.

  In the mornings, perched on the edge of consciousness, I found the trial continuing, not as a nightmare, not even as a dark irruption I sought to avoid. There was no blood, only talk. I drifted in and out of sleep for hours, always yearning at first light to return to the world of the dream, which was the world of the deliberations, as if, somehow, I could continue to discharge a task that seemed impossible to close.

  The twelve cards themselves featured prominently in these reveries, the folded stack of them rustling through my head as I slept, though in reality they lay as still as a corpse, right where I had left them on arriving home, in a neat pile on my bookshelf, next to a packet of Advil and a cigar box full of pocket change.

  I wrote personal notes to about half the jurors, saying thank you, and telling them how much I had admired their spirit through the deliberations. I sent one to Adelle. I sent one to Dean. Leah and I made plans to have a coffee, but they fell through, and neither of us made another effort. For all its power, I never allowed myself to put too much store in what she had called to tell me the afternoon of the verdict. Was it the trick ending we had all wanted? Had the messenger descended in the final act, wing-footed, wand in hand, dispelling doubt, bearing the Truth? I could not really see it this way: welcome as the news was, it ransomed our verdict only by bankrupting its logic, which I had held so dear. Did any of us, in the end, actually think Milcray was telling the truth? And yet, if this complaint was real . . .

  But was it? I had no doubt that the lawyer told this story, but who knew the truth? I thought about making an effort to look up the complaint in police records, but I decided it was better to let the whole matter lie.

  I did take a day away from the office and walk uptown from home, retracing in reverse the path Milcray took from Cuffee’s apartment to Sheridan Square. I wanted to see the building where it all happened, I wanted to see the divots in the sidewalk where the crime-scene unit had pulled up in situ blood samples. Each day during the trial the judge had explicitly forbidden us to make this walk, so each step, even now, felt like a transgression. I hung around for a while outside 103 Corlears and peered through the glass door into the entrance hallway. The curtains to apartment one were drawn, and there was no name on the bell. Someone pulled up on a bicycle, locked it, and went inside the building. I was tempted to strike up a conversation, but thought better of it. No need to alarm people; probably nothing to learn. I found the holes in the cement, and in the asphalt, and probed them absentmindedly. They were exactly where they had been marked on the prosecutor’s diagram of the corner. Encouraging. Or perhaps not. I peered into the storm sewer where the knife had been found, and walked down the block to the Watutsi Lounge. It turned out I had been there once before, when I was apartment-hunting in the neighborhood. I had gone in to pick up a copy of the Village Voice in the vestibule.

  I was wasting my time. But my time felt like a waste. Conversation was toothless, books had no life, days were without focus.

  This disturbing sense largely passed. But it took quite a while. For four days my whole being had been focused on a single problem; the solution exacted much, demanding my full intellectual and emotional ranges, extending these. It was a shared problem, a difficult problem, and a problem of considerable immediate consequence. It drew on all of me, and all of others, and we were bound by this. Life hands one few such episodes, and they are, in a way, gifts that go on costing.

  I got a packet from Rachel, who sent a picture of herself in her security-guard uniform at the National Police Monument, along with a calendar from the Policeman’s Benevolent Association and a money order for the twenty dollars I had lent her on the last day of deliberations.

  In the spring, late on a Friday night, my wife and I went to the Met to take in an exhibition of the late-medieval German master sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider. The galleries were mostly empty, quiet, and cold. The sculpture was exquisite, expressive figures in bare wood, softly lit in the open, gray space. We wandered through together, but apart, in silence. Just as the museum was starting to close, and we were leaving the gallery, there was Adelle, dressed elegantly in black, looking lovely, accompanied by a set of fellow medievalists on an outing to see the show. I introduced her to my wife; I asked how she was. She was well, and she thanked me for my note. Had she adjusted to life as usual again? More or less.

  The guards asked us to move along. Her group was headed to dinner, as were we. We would keep in touch, yes? Yes. And we said goodbye.

  As we made our separate ways out, I thought: “Life as usual again? More or less.”

  More or less.

  And in the mornings, I write, telling the story, trying to tell the story; and it isn’t until the end, the very end, as I
look at the writing, as I leave the desk, that I see (and I see it sharply, suddenly) that the writing has been, all along (without my knowing), the doing of the thing I wanted so badly from the start, that the writing has done the thing I wanted so badly from the start—it has made the trial into words, a thing to read, to interpret, to circle back through. A text. Like art. Meaning something different to each person. Keeping the large questions open.

  But the trial was not that.

  Acknowledgments

  When Robert Darnton addressed the first class of Fellows at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, he said that he hoped the center would be a place where, among other things, a scholar could come, be surprised, and take a departure; or allow a serendipitous foray to become what it became. This book happened there, in that way. My thanks to this institution, its benefactors, and the friends I made during the fellowship. I owe special thanks to a number of others: Tony Grafton, Danielle Allen, Ariela Dubler, Jesse Furman, Aaron Hirsh, Jim Schulz, Tina Bennett, George Andreou, David Burnett, Claire Gaudiani, Maria Burnett, and, of course, Christina.

  A Note About the Author

  D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science and the author of Masters of All They Surveyed. After graduating from Princeton University, he was a Marshall Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1999, Chicago’s Newberry Library awarded him the Nebenzahl Prize in the History of Cartography. A 1999–2000 Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, he has taught at Yale and Columbia Universities, and is currently an assistant professor in the History Department at Princeton.