Judgment Days - personal account: serving on a grand jury in New York City - Brief Article

National Review, August 6, 2001 by Richard Brookhiser

America is a land of amateur lawyers, entertained by sensational investigations, from O.J. to JonBenet, and by televised legal mummers, from Judge Judy to Greta Van Susteren. But of all the jurisdictions in the United States, the County of New York, or Manhattan, has the most legally sophisticated citizens, because of the judicial system's insatiable appetite for jurors. New Yorkers hurt and defraud one another in huge numbers, the police haul in seines of perps, and the defendants must be tried. The result is that anyone with a public existence-a voter, a taxpayer, a driver-comes to the attention of the system and gets called for jury duty.

In 24 years of living in Manhattan I have been called for regular jury service four times. I assumed that my place of employment would disqualify me easily-what defense lawyer would want a law-and-order pundit judging his client? But New York lawyers cannot afford to slice it so fine. They must save their challenges for potential jurors who are even more grossly inclined to bias-relatives of cops, of criminals, or of crime victims (I remember one woman who announced in the voir dire that she had both a brother who was a cop and a brother who had been recently murdered). Every time I have been called to serve, I have been picked for a jury. This month I hit the jackpot: grand-jury duty. For four weeks, five days a week, I spent half a day at the hub of the city's legal system. New York's court buildings march north from Foley Square. They are imposing structures, neoclassical or style moderne, with murals of the Founders and Hammurabi, or hortatory slogans about the importance of justice on their walls and lintels. The grand-jury room had a more modest dignity. The 23 grand jurors sat in raked, curved rows, too small for the U.N., more suited to the Congress of Vienna.

The line that everyone knows about grand juries is that a district attorney can get one to indict a ham sandwich. Before my service began, I researched the Anglo-Norman history of the institution, hoping to find more extensive powers. Once in harness, perhaps we could investigate black helicopters, or whether Vince Foster would be alive today if only he'd had a gun. In the event we whinnied and shied a few times, but mostly ran our prescribed course, alongside the attorneys, the police, the victims, and the criminals. In the legal system everyone is a traditionalist.

We heard of deadly weapons and dangerous instruments-boxcutters, crowbars, chairs, cars. We heard of sharpies running scams for many thousands of dollars and bums swiping stuff off the shelves of stores. We heard monosyllabic Morse code testimony-a short grunt means yes, a long grunt means no-and the elaborate monologues of giddy guest stars. We saw squirted crocodile tears and souls so sad they could barely speak.

Most striking was the lingo. Even as there is a form of Japanese used only to address the emperor, so there are forms of English heard only in courts. A cop the size of a refrigerator sits at the witness table, before him a folder as dainty as a diploma. "May I refer to my paper work?" he barks. "If it would refresh your recollection," the assistant district attorney replies. We heard that colloquy about 75 times. Other argot is peculiar to New Yorkers. When city folk drop their wallets, their weapons, or themselves to the ground, they say, "to the floor." They only know unnatural materials.

The naive bourgeoisie of the grand jury were impressed by the cover of undercover cops. We saw a parade of seeming riffraff-bruisers, bums, Lincoln Tunnel whores-all dangling badges. The spectacle reinforced whatever incentives we had to be good: Not only God and our mothers, but every third lowlife on the street may be watching. Human surveillance is backed by videotape, as we saw in the reality TV of cameras posted in bodegas and housing projects. French theorists talk about the imperial gaze; we shared it-an eerie sensation. Surveillance cameras do help nab the guilty; Big Brother probably also had his reasons.

Many of the tales before us were woven with a backing of drugs. Thieves stole to support habits, clients were victimized by dealers, women were dulled to brutal copulation by chemical anodynes. An argument for prohibition? No. For temperance, certainly. "Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation," said Benjamin Franklin. To which we might add, "Snort not to frenzy."

Over time I was most im/depressed by the women in abusive relationships. One class at the bottom of society is an incompetent matriarchy. Women run the home because they are the only people consistently at home. But they placidly allow themselves to be bullied and beaten by migrating men who tell them, often between blows, that they love them. They resent the blows (sometimes), but they believe the love-talk. The men who torment them fill the role of prince consorts, and they are often princely: comparatively well-spoken and alert. They have a cock of the head, or a grave demeanor. They are pretenders, though, ruling over tiny kingdoms of honor and imposition. They are punks.