Thousand Words Meme Prompt #11

The Juror

Prejudice is not uncommon in most communities. The way a person looks, acts, the color of their skin, their height, weight, the lack of emotion or the sneer or frown they wear instead of a smile. How was one supposed to be able to be unbiased, not prejudiced, open minded, in a jury?

The only other time Sally Perry had been in a real live courtroom was the five minutes she stood in front of a judge while the lawyer that she had hired, at twenty-five dollars out of every paycheck, pled her case. She sought a divorce—it was granted. Sally's first husband had abandoned her and her four year old son. For nearly a year she searched for him before giving up and asking for a divorce. Three years later, Sally was married again and for the first time in her life she had been given a summons to serve on a jury. She and her new husband had just moved into Pollard County. Within months of getting settled the summons came. Sally's husband, Kevin, had served on a jury before. His case had been for a car accident involving a drunk driver. "It was an easy case. Open and shut. Cut and dried," he'd explained to her. "There had been a ton of witnesses that saw the guy run a red light and slam into the sedan full of kids. Besides," he'd said, "you're pregnant and you probably won't be called at all. You can get off, you know. Just tell the clerk that you want to be dismissed because of morning sickness."

The thought of not serving, not doing her duty as an American citizen, had never entered into Sally's mind. She wasn't all that pregnant, not even showing. She was not that sick, nor was she working, or going to school, or doing anything that she felt was a valid reason to ask to be dismissed. Sally had heard that if a person answered the first summons to serve, she wouldn't be asked to serve again for a long time. So this once she would go and do her duty and hope not to have to return again for a while. She hoped the case she'd be given to serve on would be as easy as Kevin's had been. With an easy case she would be home by suppertime.

Proud of herself that Wednesday morning, Sally drove downtown to the county courthouse in the middle of a small mid-western town and showed the county clerk her summons. The clerk directed Sally to the courtroom down the hall, on the right. The dour faced woman behind the desk spoke and looked as if she had been doing her job for a very long time, and hated it.

The long, dark paneled hall resounded with the clicking of her heels on the hardwood flooring. She had felt the need to look her best. She wore her best skirt and blouse, high heels, nylons, and just enough makeup and jewelry to look like the average, mid-western mom. She looked as she had intended: clean cut, innocent, honest, and eager to serve as a juror for the very first time. The bailiff that stood outside the door swung it open for her. At least she thought he was the bailiff. He wore a uniform and a badge and had a revolver strapped to his belt. She didn't know very much about court procedures, only from what she'd seen on TV, and that wasn't necessarily the real world.

He smiled and used his free hand to direct her to the seats at the back at the courtroom. "You'll wait in those seats until your name is called, Ma'am. There'll be several cases filling juries today, so if you're not called for one, you're sure to be called to another before the days out."

Timidly, Sally tiptoed to an open place in the middle of the rows of seats. People were whispering to each other about anything other than serving jury duty. Sally sat straight and tall while observing, without staring. The room was filling up fast. By the time an hour had passed there was just standing room only. Sally was glad she gotten there when she did. It had been a while since she'd worn high heels and didn't think she could stand in them long.

As the room full of prospective jurors waited for the lawyers and the judge to appear, Sally couldn't help but notice the variety of people in the room. Some were dirty, longhaired, unshaven, or in dirty clothes. She wondered if some of the men weren't on a construction job somewhere—there arms were muscle-bound and tan. Other's slumped down in their seats, pulling a cap over their eyes, arms folded across their chest, some sleeping, some trying to look incognito. She noticed that there were only about ten women in the whole courtroom. Some looked like—to put it as politely as she could—ladies of the night who hadn't gone home to bed yet. Very few men wore suits or shirt and tie. Some in just jeans and T-shirts, others in some kind of service uniform. The racial mix of the room looked as if it had purposely been split into thirds. Third white, third Hispanic, and the rest African American.

The whole hour that they waited for things to get started, unknowingly, Sally had divided the people not only into race, but classes. Just by the way they looked her childhood prejudices had begun to form opinions about the lives of the people around her.

Suddenly, without warning, a loud voice sang out from the front of the room. "All rise for the Honorable Judge, J. P. Harper!" Which everyone did. Then the bailiff's booming voice called out again. "Please be seated."

After everyone had been seated a murmur spread over the crowd of participants like bees over a hive, until a loud bang from the judges gavel hit the bench several times. "His Honor will have no talking from anyone in the room unless directly spoken to," the Bailiff explained.

Sally sat and watched the surreal jockeying for potential jurors for the prosecution and the defense. What one team of lawyers didn't want the other one did. One by one the seats in the juror's box had been filled. Once the first twelve had been selected, which Sally felt lucky to have been one of the early calls, the lawyers turned on each individual juror as if they were now the criminal. Asking all kinds of personal questions: Do you belief in god. Do you drink? Are you married? How do you feel about rape? How do you feel about sex? How do you feel about obese women? How do you feel towards Hispanics? and on and on. Sally felt like the lawyers, vying for satisfactory answers for their side, were drilling holes in her brain. The lady next to her wasn't acceptable to both sides and got replaced by a man. The man in the row behind Sally, three seats to the left, got replaced by an obese, Hispanic woman. Before Sally had realized it, the jurors, the twelve most honest, upright citizens of this county that were lucky enough to have been summoned to this courtroom on this day, had been hand selected and the case would begin the next morning at nine o'clock.

Shaken, but excited, later that night Sally sat at the table eating the delicious pork chops her husband had fixed while she told him all about her experience. "It was so weird, not anything like on TV. These people, these lawyers and the judge, even the bailiff—no one ever once smiled. Only the Bailiff had bothered to use the word please. Please step up or please be seated. When it was my turn the lawyers treated me as if I had something to hide. I had to put my hand on the bible and swear that I would tell the truth. I'm a little nervous about returning tomorrow. But I've sworn to do my duty and like it or not, I'll see it through."

"You did tell them that you were pregnant, didn't you?" Kevin shook his head in disbelief. "Why didn't they dismiss you? Maybe I should call the clerk and explain what a drain this will be on you."

Sally stood up to clear the table. "I'm barely two months pregnant and I'm feeling fine. I hardly ever get sick. I can do this, Kevin. I'll be fine. Anyway, I'm very curious now to find out what kind of trial this is going to be."

"You mean you went through all that and they didn't tell you what your case was about?"

"Well, I think it might have had something to do with race and sex…" Sally sighed. Mad at herself for not picking up on what the business of today was all about. "I guess it might be a rape case?"

Kevin held the face of his sweet, innocent wife of three months, in the palms of his hands. "You're sweet, Sally, too sweet, too innocent to be serving on a rape case. Be careful not to let the others bamboozle you into doing things their way." He kissed his wife's forehead, "They didn't get so picky with us. It was an all male—all white jury. No one on the jury drank or even had a traffic ticket. How stacked was that? We were done before lunchtime."

The next morning at five minutes to nine, Sally Perry, dressed in more sensible shoes this time, entered the quiet, empty courtroom and sat in one of the jury seats. The room would be bustling, in a few minutes and she just wanted to see the quiet beauty of the courtroom before it all began. Empty and quiet like this, it seemed sacred. On the outer wall, two large windows with frosted glass flooded the room with an abundance of light. The judge's bench, the tables and chairs where the lawyers sat, the jury seats, the witness seat, was all made out of beautifully polished, cherry wood. The floor was stained a dark wood also.

Sally looked up as one by one the other juror's, under strict instructions not to speak to each other, entered the room and chose their seats. Thank goodness the juror's seats were padded leather instead of the hard wood like the rest of the benches and chairs in the room. I guess they want us to be comfortable, she almost whispered to the lady seated to her right, but she caught sight of the bailiff's stern look and clamped her mouth shut for the next three hours.

The prosecution was up first to present the case. It was a rape case. The rape of an unattractive, obese woman, unkempt and unclean by most standards of the middleclass.

The defense sought to show the members of the "esteemed jurors," that's me, Sally thought rather proudly, that the man who sat before them was not the man who raped the victim.

The defense team and the prosecutor's team bantered back and forth and drug one character witnesses after another, in a kind of mockery, to the stand. They had no eyewitness, no hard evidence to speak of; only the accusations of a very un-kept white woman, and a slouchy, unshaven, longhaired, equally un-kept, Hispanic male.

Before Sally realized it, His Honor, J.P. Harper's hit the bench with his gavel and lunch break had been called. The jurors' were now sequestered in a narrow room with a long walnut table and twelve uncomfortably hard wooden chairs. No one was allowed to talk about the case until the closing arguments had been given. They had two hours to eat their lunch. Sally thought this was good. They could relax and talk a little about the hot weather, their lives, their jobs…but to Sally's surprise, they immediately voted for a chairman of the jurors, and then this tall, brusque man, called for a guilty vote on the defendant. No discussion was supposed to take place yet, but everyone was calling the defendant guilty. Sally was dumbfounded. When she tried to be an honest, upstanding citizen and called the group for not following the rules, they turned on her. Gnashing teeth, pointing fingers, shouting at her, and someone even called her a middleclass white-ass. What did she know about life, they tested? Sally had immediately been dubbed "Little Miss Innocence" by the Hispanic woman that sat next to her in the jury box—someone she had thought from the beginning could be her ally. The whole group glared at Sally if she dared open her mouth while they proceeded to eat the lunch provided by the state.

Sally couldn't be happier to get out of that room. When they were finally called back into the courtroom to hear the closing arguments of both sides, the victim of rape, and perpetrator of the rape, Sally was in a terrible state. Due to the hostile nature of her fellow citizens watching her every move in the jury room, she had been unable to eat her lunch. Her stomach was now tied in knots and she was wishing with all her might that this whole nightmare would be over, soon.

At four o'clock the game was winding down and the jurors were now sent to the jury room for a discussion about the evidence and the case. The chairman immediately stood up and ask for a vote…well, in his way, that is. Still guilty!" the chairman shouted slamming his fist down hard on the table the way the judge had slammed the gavel on his bench.

"I mean look at the crumb," the second one said.

"He's a homeless man," the only black women in the room, weighed in.

"Yeah, but the girl is no better," someone else bellowed.

"What's that trailer trash doing out there by the school's fence in the dead of night in the first place?" the Hispanic woman next to Sally wanted to know.

"Did you get a whiff of her?" another white man said.

"Gross!" said another.

"I bet she's had sex with every guy out there, and never taken a bath in maybe a couple of months?" Everyone in the room laughed except Sally.

"I say she got what she deserved," they continued around the table.

"Piece of trash," one man lit a cigarette and blew it into the air above their heads. Sally wanted to tell him they weren't supposed to smoke in here and that she was pregnant and his thoughtlessness could harm her unborn child, but she didn't.

"Not only that, the defendant's got priors…he's raped before…he should be locked up for a long time," the woman said that had jumped on Sally at lunch.

Everyone had given their verdict and now eleven sour faces turned upon Sally.

Wallace, a big, burly man—one of the construction workers—the one who had been voted the chairman of the group, sneered at Sally. "Well, Miss Innocence!" he shouted, as if daring her to open her mouth. "You got anything to say?" the rest of jurors laughed.

Sally's face turned beat red, her gray-green eyes glazed over on the verge of tears. "Okay, okay," Wallace lowered his voice, "let's hear what the little lady has to say."

"What if he's not guilty?" Sally offered pitifully. "The prosecution didn't have very much to say about him."

"What about all those prior's?" someone from across the table shouted.

"We were told not to use the defendant's priors…" Sally was having a courageous moment, "they have nothing to do with this case. Remember our instructions? The deputy left the bag of evidence on the table. We should at least have a look in the bag, don't you think?"

For once the room was quiet. The twelve people, who didn't know of each other until last night, had finally agreed with Sally. They had to look at the evidence. The chairman opened the paper bag marked evidence and glanced in it sideways, shielding his nose from the odor coming from the woman's size 26 bikini panties. The bag was passed around the room, each person stifling a laugh, or a snicker, for Sally's sake.

"Ma'am," Wallace spoke in a more patient tone than before, "We all know he raped...had sex with the woman. We all know she wanted it. But we can't prove anything by passing around a bag of disgusting underwear that has been ripped and torn, and has semen all over it. I'd like to say this guy can go home. I'd like to say this girl needs help. But the law is very clear as to our duty. We've been asked to find him guilty because he's raped other women before, and no doubt will again if he isn't put away. We can't let him go back out on the streets. So I vote…"

The Bailiff knocked on the door and said they'd be sending in their super in about two minutes. Sally couldn't believe it. With the mention of supper they stopped the discussion, they stopped the vote, for one more chance to eat a free meal! Sally looked at her watch, it was almost six o'clock and they had gotten nowhere. Thirty minutes later the Bailiff retuned and told them that the court would reconvene next morning at nine and because this was not a high profile case and there weren't any hotels nearby with vacancies, the jury could go home to their families. But they were under strict penalty of the law if they even talked about this case to their family or friends. Yeah, right, Sally murmured to herself. Like this group is going to keep this quiet at home.

Sally still couldn't believe her ears. Once they'd all finished their supper, one by one they collected their things and went home. At nine the next morning they would reconvene and give their guilty vote to the judge. Yes this guy may have been guilty, this girl may have been raped against her will, or not, but in Sally's eyes, neither one of them had gotten a fair judgment because they were being judged by the way they looked. By their hygiene, by their mannerisms that seemed slightly, mentally imbalanced, somehow.

Protocol had not been followed in this case and even though she was good to her word and told her husband nothing about her day in court, she was not happy at all. She should have begged off due to morning sickness or something. But no, she wanted to do the right thing for her peers. She wanted to do her civic duty.

The next morning they had all reconvened in the jury room and taken a vote. Sally didn't want to vote for or against the man. She thought the whole situation was a huge joke to the eleven other jurors. She hated herself, but she felt like she had no choice but to vote guilty with the rest of them.

Back in the courtroom it had taken all of three minutes to end the case, to hand over the verdict of guilty to the Bailiff.

In the meantime, the nine men and three women involved in this jury had gotten two days off from work, with pay, eaten a nice lunch and supper on the county, and even got paid for their transportation back and forth to courthouse for three days. Sally's heart cried out, but she spoke no words in defense of the two lives ruined. The guy was jailed. The obese girl is still wandering the streets in the middle of the night. She has no roof over her head, no three square meals a day and no place to shower and put on clean clothes—if she had any. In Sally's mind the perpetrator got the better end of the deal. He's safe behind bars.

by DBB