Jury Pool Offers a Dramatic Prologue
On a typical weekday in Orange County, roughly 630 people trundle into one of various courthouses at 8 in the morning to find out if they’ll be jurors. If I’m at all typical of the crowd, they show up feeling equal parts of wanting to do their civic duty and wishing they were still home sleeping.
A summons is a summons, however, so there we were this week, my platoon of about 50 eventually being dispatched to a 10th-floor courtroom to learn which of us would sit in judgment.
This part of legal system had never struck me as particularly exciting. The drama, obviously, was concentrated in the main event: the trial and verdict.
Maybe that’s why I was caught off guard by what unfolded in our courtroom, before the trial began. I wish I’d had my reporter’s notebook to record things more diligently, but during my couple hours or so in Judge James Patrick Marion’s court, a visitor from another country could have gleaned something about life in these United States.
For lack of a more original thought, I’d call it a bit of Americana -- replete with personal stories, prejudices, aspirations, fears.
The information came from the questioning of prospective jurors. Ostensibly, the purpose was to arrive at a fair-minded panel, but, of course, the opposing attorneys were exercising some legal gamesmanship.
And as the potential jurors answered, they began revealing things about themselves, bit by bit, that they probably never intended to when they left home in the morning. Add those bits together, which I tried to do later in the day, and you got a pastiche of American life.
We heard from a young Vietnamese American who feared her English wouldn’t be good enough to pick up nuances of testimony. She’d been in the country for six years and was taking college accounting classes. At school, she said, she tape-records lectures so she can play them back but feared she couldn’t digest evidence on the fly.
A seemingly affable middle-aged man said he was a family man with a business. You figured him for a guy on Easy Street until he said that very day happened to mark his 14th anniversary of staying sober. A woman said her son took drugs in high school but turned his life around and now was a schoolteacher; a nephew started out the same way but never changed and is in prison, she said. The woman next to her said her son was a cop.
Another woman confided that a former high school classmate had been killed in a drive-by shooting. A white man who appeared to be in his 40s said he’d probably make the assumption that a young Latino man from Santa Ana -- which described the defendant -- was in a gang. Two other young women said they worked with troubled young people.
Because the defendant was up on charges of being an ex-felon with a gun and being a gang member, the defense attorney asked jurors if they could assess each charge separately and not hold against him his earlier conviction. Most indicated they could; some said they could not, even conceding they wouldn’t want someone with their feelings on a jury if they were in the defendant’s seat.
These flashes of people’s life stories and beliefs, stark and revealing in their honesty, at times began sounding like true confessions. Asked to speak honestly of feelings they probably would just as soon keep private amid strangers, their revelations brought the trial to life before it really started.
Sent packing before the final jury was seated, I don’t know if the defendant was happy with whom he got. But he found out one thing: His case will be heard not by cardboard cutouts but by people who, when added together, have lived interesting lives.
*
Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.