Reflecting on Civic Duty and Cynicism

In the infant hours of this now-expiring year, someone pushed a knife through the heart of a certain Michael Tyson of South-Central Los Angeles. By the time emergency medical technicians got him to County-USC Medical Center, he’d bled so much that his brain had starved for oxygen, and he had drifted into a vegetative state that likely will last the rest of his life.

Ten months later, Cathy Denise Brown sat at a polished table in Department 130 of Central Criminal Court. She was a heavy, mournful-looking woman of early middle age who kept shaking her head slowly, as though thinking of a bad, sad joke. She often pressed tissue to her nose and honked forlornly. The state of California was saying she was responsible for the near-killing of Michael Tyson, her boyfriend of several years.

Twelve of us were brought to sit in judgment of Brown. We were a dozen of the 300,000-plus ordinaries summoned downtown to Central Criminal Court each year to decide the fate of strangers--a dozen of the more than 1.5 million jurors annually collected by the various branches of the Superior Court of Los Angeles across the county. We were drawn, like most juries, from disparate lives. Bearing novels, knitting and cell phones, we were in equal parts discomfited by the inconvenience and inspired by the mandate placed upon us.

Brown was charged with attempted murder. As always, the charge included an alternative charge, of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to do great bodily harm.

The stabbing occurred during an outdoor New Year’s Eve party in the yard of a house said to be frequented by drug users and habitual drinkers. All the evidence against Brown was circumstantial. She alone testified to how the stabbing occurred, insisting Tyson accidentally stabbed himself while trying to stab her as the two of them drunkenly pummeled each other. The prosecution produced no other eyewitnesses.

The victim’s mother and brother and one of Brown’s good friends testified, however, that she subsequently admitted to them she’d stabbed Tyson (on the stand Brown tearfully denied she’d ever said any such thing). Moreover, Brown admitted she’d fled with the offending weapon after the incident, and thrown it away.

For seven days, we watched and listened as the prosecutor harped on the severity of the wound and testimony that Brown had used sharp implements on men, inflicting minor injuries, during arguments on two previous occasions. The defense attorney, meanwhile, emphasized and reemphasized the drunken states of the victim and the defendant.

Finally, everything was put into our hands. In the jury room, our leanings quickly became clear. We agreed Brown must have done the stabbing, but only eight of us thought her guilty of attempted murder, which must involve a specific intent to kill. Four, including me, had reservations about her intent.

We resumed on the eighth day. Essentially, the eight agreed with the prosecution that the extreme severity of the wound proved intent to kill. “You don’t stab somebody in the chest unless you want them to die,” said a young man raised in South-Central. We four were unconvinced. According to testimony, these people were drunk and drugged. According to testimony, they were fighting. How could we be sure Brown hadn’t intended merely to severely injure the victim, or that the knife’s landing where it did wasn’t the result of jostling?

Over and over we read the judge’s instructions. Some of us pored over them in solitude. We went to lunch.

When we returned, we four emphasized what seemed the essential part of the judge’s admonitions. It was this: If the evidence presented in court supported a reasonable interpretation of both intent to kill and intent to do something less than kill, the law obliged us to choose the latter.

I asked a question: Were any of the eight adamantly opposed to finding Brown guilty of anything less than attempted murder? No one was. We agreed that Brown’s act, whatever its intent, had been a vicious one, and she must answer for it. At midafternoon, we found her guilty, unanimously, of assault with a deadly weapon.

I’m prone to thinking ours is a shirker culture. I sometimes complain that our involvement in public life consists mostly of getting riled by the spewings of television’s talking heads, and voting in low numbers.

The Brown case was the second serious criminal jury trial I’ve deliberated in 2 1/2 years. Not everyone’s jury experiences are similar, I know, but my fellow jurors proved remarkably diligent, civil and fair-minded in considering circumstances that were hard to know with certainty. Although defendants were convicted in both instances, I never heard a juror say a vengeful thing about an accused, or characterize him or her as A Symbol of Something Wrong in Society, or anything other than a human being.

My experiences in the jury room put the lie to my more cynical interpretations of who we are. While I can’t say I relish being summoned again any time soon, I probably need the occasional object lesson in what proper citizenship really means.