I WAS A BELIEVER. A third of our citizens under age 65 may lack health insurance, and our government may bail out bad banks while letting good newspapers rot, but the right to trial by jury was always a bedrock reason I was proud to be an American. So when I received my summons for jury duty last June, I was excited. My friends assured me that my service would be a day of Internet surfing in the spartan, fluorescent-lit jury assembly room.
But I imagined myself a blindfolded Lady Justice, double-edged sword and scales in hand, weighing the evidence Law & Order style.
Two months later, I sat as Juror Number One inside a shabby courtroom in the Multnomah County Courthouse that was decidedly unlike anything out of a serial TV melodrama. The jury box was just 20 feet away from the wide-eyed defendant, who’d been accused of sodomy and unlawful sexual penetration in the first degree. The victim was his 25-year-old niece. As jurors, we waded through three days of evidence that ranged between confusing, boring, and just plain sad. And then, after only eight hours of deliberations, 10 of the 12 of us voted “not guilty.” In Oregon, that’s all the votes you need for a conviction.
But my own verdict? Disillusionment in the first degree. The experience made me want to put our criminal justice system on trial.
Trial by jury is the spine of our democracy, the only guarantee that appears in the body of both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. “Thomas Jefferson thought that jury service was an even more important civic duty than voting,” says Steve Kanter, a constitutional law professor and former dean of Lewis & Clark Law School. “It’s a critically important way to involve the community in the morality play that is the criminal justice system.”
In a perfect world, each jury represents a cross-section of society, a group of laypeople who will uphold community standards and, most significantly, serve as a check on government power by preventing abuses by corrupt cops, politically motivated prosecutors, and jaded judges. To protect this process and promote frank discussion in the jury room, Oregon law severely restricts post-trial investigations into jury verdicts, with only a few exceptions: the gross misbehavior of a juror (visiting a witness during the trial, for instance), or any coercion or abuse of a juror beyond the normal verbal pushing and shoving that can occur among 12 strangers who are trying to reach a consensus.
“Jury verdicts are very rarely impeached,” says Judge John A. Wittmayer of Multnomah County Circuit Court. “What happens in a jury room is almost sacred.”
MY TRIAL WAS A CLASSIC “he said/she said” loaded with a minefield of intricacies: the alleged victim was a 25-year-old lesbian and a virgin, the defendant was her 47-year-old uncle, and the uncontested acts (oral sex and digital penetration) took place in a friend’s home after a night of drinking at the Lucky Devil Lounge, a strip club in Southeast Portland. The next morning the victim woke up to discover her shirt up and her pants down. She had vague recollections of shoving her uncle’s head away from her body. The defendant said she was the one who initiated sexual contact, pulling his head to her genitals in the middle of the night.
Published: February 2010
Anna Sachse should get a national award for her article, Call of Duty.
WE THE PEOPLE, of the third safest large city in the nation per Forbes Magazine in 2009, will work to make the jury system in Oregon as well planned as Arizona to be very proud Anna Sachse lead the way.
Contact me to start said project ASAP.
Future success,
Jerry Atlansky
jmatlansky@gmail.com
I think more people should speak out about this problem! Anna Sachse is a smart intelligent woman who took her duty seriously!!
As a long time shirker of Jury Duty, I share most of Ms. Sachse observations about how the system is broken. While minor fixes to the system should be pursued, in the long term, we need to eventually eliminate the citizen jury altogether. It is beyond any reasonable duty of a citizen to have to sit through something like the Scott Peterson trial here in San Mateo that lasted for more than a year from jury selection to conviction. And it’s also true that with jurors, you get what you pay for.
Those that are shrewd but not civic minded don’t do jury duty. In my case, that means keeping my DMV registrations at my place of business and being able to say I am not a resident of that county, and doing the same with my voter registration. That’s how they find you and it’s easy to insure that you are never on the jury selection rolls.
Great article. Well written and very timely. I was shocked to learn that Oregon is one of only two states that doesn’t require a unanimous decision in felony cases, (except for homicide). Thanks to Anna for her thoughtful observations.
THANK YOU ANNA SACHSE for writing this article. As a friend to this family, I was appalled and disgusted with the outcome of the trial. This flaw in the court system needs main stream media attention for permanent change to the Oregon law. Keep writing Ms. Sachse. Do not let your determination to bring about needed changes waver. Obviously changes are in order as well to the strict following of instructions to the jurors.
Keep moving forward. I believe you will find a huge force of support behind you. I stand with the victim’s family right beside you. Future changes will not benefit what this victim went through. However, changes to the Oregon law would secure that this sort of gross negligence would not happen again.