PRESUMPTION of Guilt

A couple of months ago, I received a jury summons in the mail. I'll admit my first thoughts were "I don't have time to deal with this, how can I get out of it" I eventually decided to respond to this during my time as an intern in the courthouse, largely because of many conversations I'd had with judges and attorneys about the importance of juries and responding to jury duty.

Fast forward to my scheduled jury date.
For those who have never gotten called, the way it works is,

Day 1: Jury Panel. The attorneys for both sides (prosecutor for the state, in criminal proceedings) ask the panel of (in my case 70 people) a number of questions with the goal of flushing out bias that potential jurors have about the case in question. The goal is to remove people with obvious biases and assemble the least biased 12/13 members of the panel and make them jurors. For example: IF there is a case involving a drug possession violation, the prosecutor probably wants to remove all parties who have drug convictions themselves, anyone whose family was ruined forever when his/her father/mother went to prison for just a teeny tiny amount of cocaine. Then the lawyers pick off certain people from their comments and of those left, they pick the first 13 (12 jurors 1 alternate). (Side Note, the closer to the front you are, the greater the chances that you'll end up on the jury.)

The way they try to flush out these biases is through a series of questions that jury panel members are to answer correctly. The case I was impaneled for involved a Felony Family Assault Violence case which means the accused has been convicted of a similar crime in the past. And through the conversation with the prosecutor, so many things were revealed. As you can imagine, a group of 70 members of the Travis County public have different experiences with Family Violence. Some involved personally, some more distant. One lady shared that her aunt was killed by her abusive partner, another witnessed his mother get assaulted growing up, another spoke to her work experience seeing the cycle of violence and "if he did it before, he probably did it again", another questioned the requirement of physical pain or injury in the definition of the crime, wondering if a pulled hair should carry the same punishment as a cracked rib.

Even as we discussed further the law, many questioned the ability to find a person not guilty if he/she did not testify for themselves. They simply couldnt understand how someone who didn't commit the offense for which they were being accused, would not stand up and speak for themselves to the jurors deciding their fate. The Prosecutor did a fine job of weeding out the person who had already made up their mind about the accused's guilt.

What was unjust about the whole thing is, While we're sitting there, we all would glance at the accused and back at the attorneys asking questions. It seemed to me like it was a foregone conclusion that this man was guilty of something. They say "Presumption of Innocence" but even for someone like me who hadn't had any personal experience with domestic violence, it was difficult to hear the story about another juror who's aunt was shot to death by her husband, and not think "YOU, YOU HORRIBLE PERSON, YOU'RE JUST LIKE HIM." I mean think about it, we're all sitting in the courtroom and our mental hands are pointing fingers at this man, and I truly think 10 minutes into these questions, No one on the jury panel could fathom that this defendant was an innocent guy on the street picked up for this awful offense.



I didn't feel the need to be the annoying smarty pant law student, so I sat quietly with a comforting thought that as Juror 63 of 70, it was HIGHLY unlikely that I would get picked for the jury, so I just took the opportunity to make my observations about our criminal justice system where Justice is rarely found. Its likely more so a "System for Criminals, and maybe sometimes Justice"