Jury Duty - Part 2
I am looking back now and recall the keen attention we all shared in that box. On normal days, I am hyper aware of the various messages sent to my brain by body. I feel like I need to pee. There is something from my salad at lunch wedged in my back tooth. I have an itch just under my right shoulder blade. These messages did not reach my brain during my time as juror. They rested somewhere outside the courtroom; gnats, resting on the back of chairs placed at random in the hallway.
The two lawyers and the judge bloomed into larger-than-life beings within the four walls of the courtroom. In truth, the district attorney was diminutive and relatively stiff, despite his daily red tie and the remarkable way he was able to talk about a thirty-year-old man licking an eight-year-old girl’s vagina as if it did not gut him like a fish just pulled from the cooler. Just one of many fish pulled and sliced in half that day, the backbone stripped in one large motion as the tiny bones clung to it like the tines of a comb. The judge was built like Sylvester Stallone’s character in the movie ‘Rocky’. He looked Italian but was probably Eastern European. He had the perpetual tan look, and broadly set eyes, and an impassive countenance, as if he dared anyone to take a swing at him.
I would shift my focus throughout the day from the district attorney to the defense attorney, to briefly, the man charged with this offense, this unbearable act against his own niece. My eyes drifted over him like a painting I did not come to see at an art gallery. I found him bleak, pasty, uninteresting short of the crime he had possibly committed. He looked at only the judge or his own attorney, as if a trained dog, through the entire proceedings. As if he had been told do not make eye contact with any of the jurors or any of the witnesses. Remain alert but heel. Stay in your seat unless I tell you to stand.
Outside the courtroom we the jurors were not allowed in the halls except for lunch, when we could leave the third floor for an hour. We lined up and went straight to our room, sequestered and sullen children sent there until we were called out again. We didn’t speak to each other in our room, aside from the occasional disruption, almost an offensive burp, when one of us felt a need to speak. It usually came in the form of a question. Can we talk about what we think as we go along, or do we have to wait until the deliberations time? Does anyone know what movie that was she was talking about? How long do you think this will last? The rest of our eyes landed on the speaker, slightly embarrassed, unsure how to respond. Someone would tender an answer, hoping to cut the conversation off before it grew legs. If snuffed out quickly, en masse we returned to staring at the table, tapping on the edges of our phones as if they were talismans of good fortune.
I believed the evidence would be presented for several days or more. In the end, it took less than two days. There was only one key witness, one person who mattered. She told her story only as a child incapable of lying in front of so many strangers could do. It was plain. She squirmed in her chair, tucking one leg under her. She liked the questions about her friends and school and the game Candy Crush her mom let her play on her cell phone. She was bored with being asked about her uncle, about what he did to her over a year ago. She didn’t, however forget.
Research following sexually traumatized children into adulthood indicates that negative behaviors and self-care tend to underscore the lives of adult survivors. As adults, these victims are more likely to view relationships and life’s more difficult moments as insurmountable obstacles. Their early trauma makes them more vulnerable to cycles of self-defeating talk and actions.[1] This child had already been made vulnerable in all aspects of her life, which was laid out for each of us jurors to see, through the testimony of her own parents, her grandmother, her uncle, and third parties who were there to help her. This was a family that had transferred trauma from one generation to the next, like handing over the family trove – one which included instructions on abandonment, mental and physical abuse, and a complete lack of care for the individual. This child would have to rely on some inner strength she was born with to break free from the cycle, should she discover it within herself. If she had not been loved by her caretakers, those charged with keeping her safe, in helping her thrive – it was not likely she was going to know how to love herself. These wires connect and grow circuit boards inside of us at a very young age. In the courtroom she was now nine, almost ten. When the district attorney asked her if she was reading yet she looked blankly at him.
He moved on to the next question.
In the room where we decided this man’s fate, this little girl’s fate, I wondered if oxygen was being pumped in. You could feel the clarity of our joint brainwaves, merging into one. We were all on the same page, but approached our final vote tentatively, as if we might hurt someone’s feelings. Several of us spoke of abuse in our own families. Did this make us more able to see the truth or less able to judge fairly? I think neither – in the end we all brought to that room our collective experiences of living and interpreting and relying on our guts, wherever the evidence was lacking.
We all agreed that outside of the little girl, the only credible witness was her own father, who she did not know well and called by his first name. The man she only saw on a rare occasion who could be her grandfather based on his age. The man who had three other grown daughters.
“When I saw them together there, and he was kneeling on the floor by her bed, I felt…red flags went off, you know?” behind his thick glasses his eyes were rimmed pink. He pleaded silently with them at the district attorney’s stiff frame, as if for absolution. He was a man grief-stricken by his failure to understand in the moment what he had seen, his failure to have stopped whatever it was that had just happened to his youngest daughter.
I watched as he moved from the witness stand, his hand gripping his cane, his head hung like a guilty man. It was the defining moment of the trial for me; a father unable to protect his own daughter from the evil that sat right in front of him, in her own bedroom with the door slightly ajar, for six or seven hours on that fateful day.
[1] https://keepkidssafe.org/6-ways-molestation-affects-adult-survivors/