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.
According to the article, the uncle and niece went to a strip club together, consumed a large quantity of alcohol together, and participated in nonviolent sexual acts that did not include sexual intercourse.
For that you’d like to see him in prison for eight years (minimum) and branded a sexual predator for life?
Justice was served in this instance. The statement that he is now a free man who would not hesitate to do this again sounds absurdist, and the victim in this instance was the taxpayer forced to foot the bill to prosecute this man.
Hello word!!!
This article appears to criticize the author’s fellow jurors more than the jury system itself. The author offers some ideas on improving the jury system, but those ideas cannot ‘fix’ the author’s main concerns.
History provides our worst abuses of the jury system. All-white juries of the Jim Crow era found guilty many African-Americans with less consideration for the evidence and more weight placed on the skin color of the defendant charged. The jury reforms addressing the errors of Jim Crow include allowing a “challenge for cause” based on a potential juror’s racial biases, and outlawing the exclusion of a person from serving on a jury, because of their race.
There is a remarkable truth to note here about those reforms. Those reforms alone would not have accomplished the goals of those reforms. Only through the continuous hard work of the attorneys, judges, legal community and the larger community have we managed to progress past the Jim Crow era. The individual defense attorneys who worked with one client at a time, one trial at a time, often times alone in a tide of Jim Crow emotions, deserve our respect and gratitude for removing the racial biases from our juries and for literally changing the way we think about race.
Reforms alone do not accomplish goals, because democracies are kept healthy only by having a participating, literate and rational citizenry. The jury system is the most democratic institution in our nation where a person is judged by his “peers” who are selected at random from a fair cross-section of that person’s community.
Jurors do tend to consider the evidence, and as people, they consider evidence within the boundaries of their own biases, biases which are a result of their life experiences. Sometimes those life experiences impart wisdom, and sometimes those life experiences impart racism, ignorance or even simply a world view different from our own. The author reveals her fellow jurors’ biases, and she also reveals her own. Their individual biases reflect their life experiences as different from hers, and that appears to be the author’s main concern.
As a judge, I’d try my case to a jury. I say that because I know that one person (even an experienced judge) never hears it all. There are always things you miss that others (if there are any) would catch. The power of the jury system is the deliberations that (should) bring out all the details and make sure that every fact gets considered. Jurors are representatives of the community, and, as this writer reveals, that has its disadvantages, but it would be a mistake to think that judges don’t suffer from similar limitations. Of course things could be improved, and much has been done to do that, and more needs to be done, but to abandon the jury system, despite its warts, would be to give up on a critical aspect of our freedom.
When the best we have goes badly, it is tragic and sad indeed. This is a stinging reminder of our imperfections, with good suggestions for improvement.
I still step back and assess our jury system, and still find it the very best form of government of by and for the people that has existed anywhere on the planet at any time — in spite of its real impediments.
No one can back door lobby jurors. They don’t run for election or re-election to juries. They don’t campaign on issues to get on cases. No one can buy their result or their presence on the jury. No one can provide personal incentives to attempt to influence jurors. The only evidence and arguments they receive they receive in open court, on the record, and before all parties interested in the case.
Compare juries, then, with the rest of democracy — even the election of judges in judge-elected states [like Oregon] or in judge-appointed jurisdictions in which corporations are now apparently constitutionally entitled to attempt to purchase the election of people who will appoint judges to do their will.
Yes, we are people, and we people have flaws. I’ve watched juries in my courtroom over 20 years, and list about 6 as beyond a reasonable result. One was not unlike the one ANNA SACHSE describes – terrible failure.
Overwhelmingly, juries do a really great job – we just can’t expect to avoid the human frailties of governance by humans altogether; we must do our best to do our best.
It remains my perception that jury service overwhelmingly summons the best form of citizenship behavior to the task.
Michael Marcus
http://courts.oregon.gov/Multnomah/General_Info/Judges/Marcus/Judge_Marcus_Contact_Information.page?
Anna Sachsy is my hero! I am the victim in the trial that she is referring to. I was not going to comment on this article, because I have already met with her personally and expressed my gratitude. However, after reading Jim Smith’s letter to the Editor and Anna Hanlon’s comment about this article, I feel compelled to leave a comment. Mr. Smith felt the jurors should be applauded for doing their job, but they didn’t, they out right disobeyed the judges instructions and discussed the mandatory sentencing under Measure 11 during their deliberations. It is not the Jury’s job to decide the sentencing, its their job to determine guilty or not guilty. They chose to vote not guilty, because they felt that what my uncle did not warrant the mandatory sentencing that he would receive under Measure 11. MY BODY was the one that was violated. I challenge everyone, if things were done to you that you would NEVER wish or want to be done to you, your body was violated in the way that mine was, how can you say that it is not severe enough. I’m the one that has to live the rest of my life with the betrayal of trust, violation of my body and the memory of my first sexual experience being against my will and being done by my uncle! These things will be apart of me for the rest of my life and effect in some capacity every single relationship I have or will have, personal or romantic for the rest of my life. Which leads me to Ms. Hanlon statement that what happened to me was “ok” because my uncle didn’t actually penetrate me with his penis. I have worked on the Warms Springs Indian Reservation for half my life creating programs for the youth that provide healthy and safe environment for them to participate in. 7 out of every 10 of those children that I have worked with have been or are being sexually abused. According to Ms. Hanlon that’s OK because the majority of them are non violent and there is not always penile penetration. BULL S***!!! I am supposed to look into those children’s eyes and say “Sorry what happened to you was unfortunate but not violent enough…. So get over it.” Those children, like myself, were not or are not willing participants in the sexual acts that took or are taking place. My uncle understood and was fully aware that I am a Lesbian woman that I have NEVER been sexually attracted to men and have absolutely ZERO desire to have sex with them PERIOD! Yet he still chose to take advantage of me in an inebriated state. I trusted him and was close to him and never thought that anything like this would ever happen. The joke is on me. He HAS done this before and gotten away with it (including with my aunt/HIS sister- this knowledge came out after he was arrested for assaulting me.) He is a sick, disgusting, perverted, pathetic excuse of a man! He WILL do this again if he has not already! In regards to the comments about the lack of evidence in this case, there is evidence and factors that Ms. Sachsy did not mention due to the context of her article. Thank you Anna Sachsy for having the courage to be a voice and speak up for what you believe in. I am and will always be eternally grateful!
I am Anna Castile’s sister I took her comment over the phone and after I posted it, I realize that I spelled Ms. Sachse’s name wrong three different times. This is my error not my sisters. I am so sorry sis and I apologize Ms. Sachse!
Thank you Ms. Sachse for writing this article. I unfortunately know the defendant in this case, Timothy Underhill. He came to my work the night the trial ended and bragged to me about how he took advantage of his niece and got away with it. He went into graphic detail of what he did to her and I threw up right there. He was proud of what he did and had no remorse. It was absolutely disgusting! I am disappointed that justice didn’t find him this time but am confident that it will in the future, because he WILL do this again Mrs. Hanlon!
It’s really tragedy I’m not American and I dont know what to say but I think its about how do you choose the juries what’s the standards in USA and do the juries take testimony of witness in my humble opnion I think the jury system is better than civil law because in civil law just one person hears all the case but I think you need to reappraisal your jury system
Rape is always bad and juries in this case have washing the rights
in my humble opnion its about how do you choose the juries
does your goverment enhance the knowledge and skills to juries or what?
then in this case u have 2 persons was against juryies decisions is it contested decisions ???